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Native ZFS Is Coming To Linux Next Month

Posted by timothy on from the is-it-as-magical-as-advertised? dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix is reporting that an Indian technology company has been porting the ZFS filesystem to Linux and will be releasing it next month as a native kernel module without a dependence on FUSE. 'In terms of how native ZFS for Linux is being handled by this Indian company, they are releasing their ported ZFS code under the Common Development & Distribution License and will not be attempting to go for mainline integration. Instead, this company will just be releasing their CDDL source-code as a build-able kernel module for users and ensuring it does not use any GPL-only symbols where there would be license conflicts. KQ Infotech also seems confident that Oracle will not attempt to take any legal action against them for this work.'"

2 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Can I remove a disk from it yet? by Daffy+Duck · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=131604
    http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=270957

    Long story short: disk pools in ZFS can only grow, so don't make any mistakes unless you can afford to do a full dump and restore. Sun had been "working on" this for years. Anyone heard any news lately?

  2. Re:If it comes out and works well by Cyberax · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "* *Actual* performance problems due to fragmentation - outside of a few corner cases - are basically nonexistant. "

    Yep. That's why I have to run defragmenter on our build server every week...

    Also, Windows is notoriously slow with file operations. It's not directly related to NTFS, but more to extremely inefficient VFS stack.

    "* Can you explain what you mean by "it's done above the VFS layer" ? Surely you're not trying to argue symlinks and shortcuts are the same thing ? "

    http://neosmart.net/blog/2006/vista-symlinks-revisited/

    "* RAID is handled at the block device level, not the filesystem level (and many, many people believe putting RAID into the "filesystem" is an architecturally bad thing, so that's hardly something it can be plainly criticised for)."

    However, filesystem-level RAIDs have a lot more functionality than block-level RAIDs. Look at ZFS or BTRFS.

    "* Do you have a source for up-to-date benchmarks ?"

    I have my own set of benchmarks. Well, NTFS on Windows is almost always slower (and quite often like 100 _times_ slower) than Linux filesystems.

    http://rsdn.ru/File/37054/benchmark.zip - this is the source.

    http://rsdn.ru/forum/philosophy/1710544.1.aspx - this is a post with benchmark results (in Russian, sorry - I can translate if you have any questions)

    http://rsdn.ru/forum/philosophy/1712431.aspx - this post contains this benchmark, slightly adapted.

    I regularly re-run these tests. So far, Windows is only getting slower compared to Linux.

    I've recently created a multithreaded version of this test. Well, let's say that NTFS sucks so badly, that it's hard to understand how MS has managed to achieve this.