ZFS On Linux - It's Alive!

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."

Comments

Re:Why the big deal about booting from it?

[drinkypoo]

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.