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ZFS On Linux - It's Alive!

Posted by Zonk on from the insert-mad-science-laugh-here dept.

lymeca writes "LinuxWorld reports that Sun Microsystem's ZFS filesystem has been converted from its incarnation in OpenSolaris to a module capable of running in the Linux user-space filsystem project, FUSE. Because of the license incompatibilities with the Linux kernel, it has not yet been integrated for distribution within the kernel itself. This project, called ZFS on FUSE, aims to enable GNU/Linux users to use ZFS as a process in userspace, bypassing the legal barrier inherent in having the filesystem coded into the Linux kernel itself. Booting from a ZFS partition has been confirmed to work. The performance currently clocks in at about half as fast as XFS, but with all the success the NTFS-3g project has had creating a high performance FUSE implementation of the NTFS filesystem, there's hope that performance tweaking could yield a practical elimination of barriers for GNU/Linux users to make use of all that ZFS has to offer."

4 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's time for Sun by Alphager · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Sorry, it's Linux that's playing the license games, not Sun. One only needs to look at ZFS support in FreeBSD to see that (Speaking of, where's the 'ZFS On FreeBSD!' story?).
    There is no "ZFS on FreeBSD"-story, because all five users of FreeBSD allready know about it. Linux has a much wider adoption out there, thus the focus on linux.
  2. Re:Why the big deal about booting from it? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Really? Stick an old 20gb drive in as your boot drive and boot from whatever you have to to get up and going, load ZFS modules, mount all drives and enjoy. What's so terrible about booting from a different drive / file system? Most mobos now let you hang boatloads of drives of all types on them.

    By using a single boot drive you are introducing a single point of failure. But booting from a ZFS volume spread across multiple physical volumes means that even the boot process is protected by redundancy. It also allows you to enjoy all the many other benefits of ZFS, such as the RAID-like behavior, the ability to grow partitions, et cetera.

    I can't think of any reason why it would be so terrible to boot up from an old 20gb with ext2/ext3 or anything else, then run the rest of your system under whatever.

    That's because you lack imagination and, apparently, experience.

    Besides, I suspect that most people that would run ZFS are the type of people that leave their machines up for months at a time. In that case, why the panic attacks over booting issues?

    In a responsible work environment, we would like things to happen on time every time. That includes rebooting.

    If a machine is up for months at a time, then it clearly did not get critical security updates, which often are in the kernel. You should never have uptime that high. High uptimes are for fanboys (my machine has been up for 369 days! and I've only been owned twice!)

    Finally a system that's up with the times.

    Actually, ZFS is missing a lot of functionality that we'd like to see in a modern filesystem. But it's a better effort than most.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  3. Re:It's time for Sun by Ant+P. · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Linux is just a kernel, while the BSDs are entire operating systems.

    You mean "GNU/BSD" - after all, C source code doesn't run directly on the CPU ;)
  4. Re:Why not in the kernel? by BrainInAJar · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Why should they have given any care whatsoever about sharing code with Linux? They chose the license most acceptable to them with no regard to Linux whatsoever and that's that. OpenSolaris is not Linux, and should therefore not go out of it's way to either help or hinder Linux.

    "Whatever else their relative merits, Linux has by far the wider hardware support. I don't know, maybe there's a few crucial drivers Solaris would have to give up for lack of available GPL drivers, but they're giving up access to a ton of Linux driver code."

    Solaris driver support is actually quite good. Whatever obscure hardware that nobody cares about that Linux supports and Solaris doesn't is quite inconsequential to the project. If anyone cares about the hardware either OpenSolaris contributors directly, or one of the BSD's will support with a much more acceptable license anyways.
    Solaris has very little of any consequence to gain from sharing code with Linux, but Linux stands to gain a lot from the wholesale looting out of Solaris' tree.

    Is it any surprise that the only people you hear calling for GPL Solaris then are Linux users? Solaris users are quite fine with the way things are.