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Native ZFS Is Coming To Linux Next Month
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.'"
Sun used the CDDL just to make sure Linux never got ZFS. Even that move is not going to save solaris, only open sourcing it earlier would have done that. I say this as a linux user who likes solaris and thinks it will be a shame to see it die. Well I like it once the GNUtools are installed, the solaris versions sucked.
They are both quite open, how free they are some might argue about.
It's open source in the sense that the source is open. Free to view, and free to use as long as you don't distribute it.
They don't prevent use. They prevent redistribution as part of the whole.
I can download, build, and install fglrx (which is completely non-free) or this ZFS module. I just can't distribute either module linked into the kernel.
No, really. I had a bunch of questions going in, and they were all answered. This is rare enough to warrant a shout out to Michael Larabel.
I disagree with some of his subjective claims like x86_64 being a substantive limitation or ZFS on Linux remaining niche (I guess that depends on how you define the niche...) but he got the national lab project, the zpool version, the Oracle (nee Sun) patent problem. Kudos.
FreeBSD 9 is probably where ZFS will wind up finding a proper home, I'm guessing.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
BTRFS will end ZFS if Oracle does not kill that too.
Mount a nice fast SSD as swap would be a good start. Then point your /tmp to a tmpfs.
I hear that every install of ZFS for Linux comes with a pre-installed Steam client, and a free copy of Team Fortress 2 For Linux!
ZFS has becoming vapor ware since apple announced snow kitty wasnt gunna support it.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
No, Sun used the CDDL because they hate the restrictions on GPL. The sharing issues go both ways, Sun wanted to keep some ownership. It's not like the BSD license exists just to spite GPL.
- oZ
// i am here.
Looks like I'll finally have a reason to get around to rebuilding my home server. Well, as soon as WD finishes warrantying one of the drives in the array that is. Current estimates put ZFS and the drive arriving at the same time!
No, they are a company that exists to make money. Saving Solaris would make them more money. Very simple. Corporations do not hate like that, they only do what they must to maximize profit.
BSD is a fine license, it was created for a real purpose, not to just protect a doomed product.
Seems a little early to be putting faith in that. It's feature list looks good, on par with other modern desktop file systems like HFS+ and NTFS. However it is currently unstable. When will that be fixed? Who knows? Maybe it moved full steam ahead and we have a stable, capable file system next month. Maybe the project loses steam and languishes and 4 years from now it is still "unstable" and "coming soon."
You can't really say how well it'll work until there is stable code to test. Remember designing a file system isn't the real hard part. I'm not saying it is trivial work or that it is unimportant but it is by far the easier part of all this. You can write out a specification that sounds great on paper, but then you have to implement it. That is the much harder part. You have to make it fast, stable, not corrupt data, able to do everything it should and so on.
This is part of the reason why NTFS on Linux has been so tricky. It is actually pretty well documented in the Windows Internals book, and other places, but it is a complex file system. FAT, on the other hand, is real simple and thus not hard to implement.
As an example you can look at driver sized. The NTFS driver in Windows is 1.6MB. The FAT driver, on the other hand which supports multiple versions of FAT, is only 200k. The NTFS kernel driver is one of the very largest in the system, only the ATi video driver (much larger) and TCP/IP stack (a bit larger) are bigger than it on my system.
So we'll see what happens with btrfs. As of late, there's not been much activity. The last version update was June 2009. Maybe they are rolling up final testing for production release, or maybe things have slowed down and release is not near. We'll just have to wait and see, but it is foolish to believe this will be the Next Big Thing(tm) at this point.
I hope this idea http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test also works with the port (and will be working with btrfs one day!?):
Transparently adding an SSD into the slow-HD-to-fast-CPU-register cache hierarchy. Are there ways to make something like this work with current FSes?
Mount a nice fast SSD as swap would be a good start. Then point your /tmp to a tmpfs.
My swap is practically always empty, so that would not help much. And how much stuff gets written into /tmp? Mine is 839kiB right now, that is neglible and probably in RAM cache already. What I want cached are all the binaries and libs linked from there. Then starting any app for the second time would be near-instant and this cache would survive reboots and be one or two orders of magnitude larger than RAM.
We've heard much about ZFS, but being a slashdotter, I can't recklessly go on and RTFA. So, maybe someone here can recap its main benefits. Maybe a power point slide?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
There's a despair poster, I believe, with a caption along the lines "it could be, your main purpose in life, is to provide a warning to others". (Damn it, the internet made me check ... "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others."
ZFS's purpose was not to be a next generation file system, but to encourage next generation file systems to be built. Free Software has a tendency to get stuck at "good enough" sometimes. And someone has to come along and show that there is a better way. Competition is good. Sometimes it's internal (gcc vs egcs), sometimes it commercial (CVS vs perforce and bitkeeper).
What if ZFS was GPL? What if it went into Linux? It might get incremental tweaks, but it would stagnate at "good enough". Instead, btrfs, hammer, etc were developed -- much better, much cleaner file systems.
ZFS has some cute tricks. What could be better than taking a sledgehammer to a disk drive without causing problems? But ultimately, ZFS would hold linux back.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I would honestly then say mount it as /. Seems the easiest way to do something similar to what you want. Not exactly the same, but with 32GB SSDs being very affordable not a huge hurdle either.
This sounds great.
However, some of the authors comments in the Phoronix thread (such as "FUSE is crap") -- and the fact that he's announcing this on Phoronix instead of via some other technical channel temper my enthusiasm just a bit...
No, Sun used CDDL to be deliberately incompatible with the GPL because they knew the good bits would get assimilated into Linux if they didn't.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Free Software has a tendency to get stuck at "good enough" sometimes.
Not just free software. IE6 has the poster child of getting stuck at "good enough" until it was kicked out of place.
No, Sun used the CDDL because they hate the restrictions on GPL. The sharing issues go both ways, Sun wanted to keep some ownership. It's not like the BSD license exists just to spite GPL.
This is the third time I've seen someone post something to this effect in the past week. I smell a smear campaign. Nonetheless, I'm calling BS here. Daneese Cooper, one of the individuals who helped draft the CDDL, stated that they based the CDDL on the MPL "partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part of the design when they released OpenSolaris." It was made deliberately GPL-incompatible, but this has nothing to do with 'restrictions' in the GPL.
It was deployed to desktops, and on by default, in Windows Vista/7. It does copy on write and maintains old snapshots of files automatically. On the server side, there is some more management of this if you like. This snapshotting feature is also used by backup utilities to do hot backups. Ghost and TrueImage can image a running system using it. They can snapshot the state for backup and new data can be committed while they work, without messing with anything. Works great. That is also independent of the maintaining of old versions so you can shut that down if you like and still do snapshots for backups.
> ZFS's purpose was not to be a next generation file system, but to encourage next generation file systems to be built. Free Software has a tendency to get stuck at "good enough"
This is a tad ironic considering that a 3rd party had to bail out Sun in this regard.
Solaris was the perfect example of "rut-ware".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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?
Precisely, FreeBSD for a long time (Possibly still) shipped with two math emulators, one which was compiled in by default was kind of bogus but BSD licensed, the other which only included source was GPLed, but happened to work better. It was a bit of a pain, but ultimately worked, people didn't usually redistribute custom kernels anyways, so the requirements of the GPL weren't particularly restrictive on the typical user and everybody could have what they wanted.
Thanks for linking to the thumbnail. I'll take your word for it that that's what it says.
Pretty much, it absorbed the best parts (except SMIT) from all the Unix OS's from the 80's and 90's.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'm not holding my breath, but god damn...
If this ever happens, my wildest dreams will have come true. Forget the threesome with now-hideous-and-leathery-old-but-once-hot porn stars from my youth! Not having to deal with any more Solaris or FreeBSD for a 'modern filesystems' would be incredible.
Like I said, not holding my breath (or even breathing heavily!). If it happens it'll happen only at the fringes, and poorly.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Mount a nice fast SSD as swap would be a good start. Then point your /tmp to a tmpfs.
That's not even remotely close to the same thing.
1. Dedup is already part of ZFS - just not in an official release yet. You can get it in the dev builds of OpenSolaris. However, because Oracle has canceled OpenSolaris, you will not likely see an official dedup-enabled ZFS until Solaris 11.
My understanding, though, is that Sun has some storage solutions in production /w ZFS dedup that you can buy today.
Considering that no other open source file system offers this feature, it seems like a stupid criticism.
2. Those characters can be represented in UTF-8 just fine, and I just created a folder with that exact name. No problems.
Personally, I still think IE was better than the alternatives for some time. Netscape 4 and IE 5 were about on par; each had advantages over the other. IE improved a bit to 5.5 and to 6, while Netscape didn't. And it was a long time until Firefox showed up on the scene.
Actually your analogy is kind of funny, because while I'm by no means an expert, I did read the Wikipedia article on it about a week ago, and there's a section about an article in the Rutgers Law Review called "The Myth of the Ford Pinto Case" that basically said (1) the Pinto really wasn't worse than most cars of the era and (2) that memo you alude to is incredibly misdescribed. (The latter point is supported by the fact that the trial judge actually ruled it inadmissable.) In particular, it was not a "the cost of the lawsuits will be less than the cost of a recall" analysis.
(Of course this means that in some sense you could say IE6 was worse than the Pinto. ;-))
I'll be the first to say that ZFS has some shortcomings and limitations.
However, it's like Active Directory is to the workstation/server model of enterprise networking: it does everything. There is nothing else which comes close (or shell we say, 9/10ths of the way) to it in terms of it's "completeness" and feature set. Yes, it has some severe limitations ("Windows only") and shortcomings ("OMG it's a pain to troubleshoot"), with a fairly deep learning curve as well as a limited domain of applicability beyond the base subset (network administrators/storage techs).
But at the end of the day, they do things easily which most other products can't even do in such a complete fashion. Before such capability can be surpassed, it has to be met. AD and ZFS have been out now in more-or-less their current incarnation for close to 7 years, and only a bare subset of those features are elsewhere (and in less-than-ideal development status).
Frankly, ZFS is a (the) "next generation filesystem" for these reasons. It made assumptions (which are wrong), but do not make it lack utility. The management toolset is clean (very clean).
How, exactly, was being the conceptual "next generation" not the conceptual goal for the first 64 bit, CoW, RAID-built-in filesystem available? Seems to me that's why it's the fox everyone is chasing...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I seriously doubt that mounting /. As your filesyatem will help in any way. You'd end up just reading and commenting on each post and forget TFA altogether.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
This is the third time I've seen someone post something to this effect in the past week. I smell a smear campaign.
Nonetheless, I'm calling BS here. Daneese Cooper, one of the individuals who helped draft the CDDL, stated that they based the CDDL on the MPL "partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part of the design when they released OpenSolaris." It was made deliberately GPL-incompatible, but this has nothing to do with 'restrictions' in the GPL.
And Cooper's assertion was reject by Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer for quite a while (before leaving Oracle in the last few weeks):
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messageID=55013#55008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distribution_License#GPL_incompatibility_controversy
Instead, btrfs, hammer, etc were developed -- much better, much cleaner file systems.
How can filesystems that don't exist in stable release form yet be "better" than ZFS?
ZFS is far ahead of btrfs, both in terms of stability, features, and usability. Btrfs doesn't have parity RAID, dedupe, or replication yet. These are critical features for large-scale systems. In short, it isn't even close to ZFS. ZFS is also "cleaner" in my opinion, in both design and UI. Oracle funding most btrfs development also raises a question of btrfs momentum now that they own ZFS and Solaris.
What could be better than taking a sledgehammer to a disk drive without causing problems?
Shooting it with a .45?
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
Sun used the CDDL just to make sure Linux never got ZFS
That's a paranoid way of looking at it. Why Sun chose the CDDL instead of the GPL was to retain the right to fork a proprietary version while retaining GPL-like lincensing in all other respects. The CDDL is a better choice for businesses than the GPL as it offers some degree of protection from FSF lawsuits while still requiring that modifications be contributed back to the community.
Quoting http://blogs.sun.com/chandan/entry/copyrights_licenses_and_cddl_illustrated
A common misconception is about CDDL and GPL incompatibility. (Incompatibility in the sense: to combine two source files, one under GPL and another under CDDL, to create a common executable.) GPL is incompatible with most licenses like Mozilla Public License, Apache, and CDDL. GPL wants you erase those licenses and use GPL in that place, where as these licenses do not permit erasing them. Hence the incompatibility deadlock.
It's not hard to be incompatible with the GPL. The GPL prohibits a lot of actions. Good for some, not for others.
- oZ
// i am here.
And I'm sorry, but Danese Cooper is *not* the authoritative source on this. Despite whatever she claims, there are far more people that are at Oracle now, or that are Ex-Sun that will tell you the opposite.
The designers of the CDDL may have had some sort of agenda against the GPL, but the fact remains; when it comes to license compatibility issues in general, it is the GPL which is decidedly incompatible with every other license. The CDDL would be the rare exception of a license that is incompatible with the GPL on purpose, and Sun obviously had business reasons to do it. Therefore, while the GP is very probably wrong in asserting that Sun uses the CDDL because they hate GPL restrictions, he is also probably correct (from what I've seen) that some GPL advocates tend to view those who choose a non-GPL license as trying to thwart GNU and/or Linux so they don't have to admit that maybe other licenses have terms and conditions that have their own merit.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
IE 6 got stuck a long way short of good enough.
Obviously other people don't share your high regard for the current state of BtrFS in relation to ZFS. I wonder why that is?
Its easy to DOS the BTRFS and kill the system. A normal user can do it. Just create a couple of big files. Then, copy a large number of small files. You will get ENOSPC at around 90%. Then, delete the large files. Even with most of the space being free, it won't allow you to create new files. All new requests will get ENOSPC. Bug is at: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16508 BTRFS is a mess. Go read their mailing lists.
And the source is available now: http://github.com/behlendorf/zfs/wiki
Has nobody seen this?
Larger version
Given that Oracle were pushing BTRFS, they also push linux, and they now own Sun (and thus ZFS), suing over ZFS development on Linux would kinda be shooting themselves in the foot.
I can't see how oracle being able to use ZFS on linux and then easily upgrade their customers to Solaris + ZFS as needs change would be a bad thing for them?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Good enough at that time was better than Netscape 4 or the very early unstable builds of Mozilla.
No, they are a company that exists to make money.
Companies don't exist to make money. They exist to serve the desires of those involved in the company. One aspect of that is usually to make money (non-profit corporations, for example (and by definition), do not exist to make money).
In the case of the license for Solaris was chosen to serve a purpose, and that purpose was almost certainly not specifically to make money. Sure, making money was taken into consideration, but acting like it was the sole motivator is not exactly rational. No more so than saying a person takes a specific job with the sole motivation of making money. That's almost impossible, as there are plenty of motivations for the exact jobs people choose, and while making money is the most obvious, it's not as simple as just that.
Now, to be sure, those in charge of corporations in the US tend to run them with the sole goal of making money, that doesn't make it some sort of universal truth. Whenever I see someone who tries to portray it as such generally has as their motivation a way of promoting actions that would otherwise be indefensible for their inherent repugnance.
I would also hate to see Solaris die. I remember looking at it a while back, and thinking that it had promise. However, with all the talk about copyright issues and incompatibilities, I thought it best not to get too familiar with it. I think that at the time, one reason that I liked it was ZFS. The other reason is that it was one more OS out there for my list of "Other OS's that are not Windows or Mac". It comes in handy in conversation sometimes.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
Oracle probably has a ton of patents around ZFS as well, so merely complying with the license is probably not enough. Just look at Java...
That's not the GPL's fault. It's the fault of the IP lawyers who are dicing permissions exceedingly fine. The GPL is designed to guarantee certain freedoms at the cost of others. It does its job very well, and is well architected with a lot of forethought considering we're only on version three after 21 years. At least one of those two revisions can be blamed not on the faults of the license but on the changing legal and IP environment.
Believe it or not once upon a time if you wrote some code somebody found interesting you just sent it to them. No patents. No copyrights. No approvals from management or legal. You just sent it, happy that someone else might benefit from not redoing the work you'd done once already. The idea of profiting from the derivatives they might make, or the derivatives of the derivatives, was simply not an idea that would occur to a normal person. If you had suggested such a thing at that time we'd have thought it hilarious.
And now I have to point to the onion on my belt, which was the fashion in my day.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Only open sourcing it earlier? So they could undermine a larger version of their own community?
Open sourcing Solaris clearly did not save Solaris. Solaris is probably a better operating system than Linux, but apparently the only way Oracle thought it could be “saved” it is by charging a fortune to shove it down the throats of its own customers. Whatever. Worse certainly seems better in this case.
ZFS is nice but it doesn't have an fsck, partly because of its design philosophy. I think this is an omission and http://www.osnews.com/story/22423/Should_ZFS_Have_a_fsck_Tool_ explains why (links to many examples where ZFS won't open a zpool after an abrupt shutdown, possibly due to ZFS bugs or disks that lie about flushing cache to disk).
There is a new zpool recovery feature - discussed in http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/6071-No,-ZFS-really-doesnt-need-a-fsck.html - the command is "zpool clear -F data" which is a very specific sort of fsck - it just unwinds the last few transactions, enabling you to have a valid zpool but losing a few recent updates, which is usually better than a complete restore from backups. The feature is mentioned at http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/6067-PSARC-2009479-zpool-recovery-a.html (PSARC 2009/479) and is available since Opensolaris build b128 (ref: http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=127689&tstart=0 )
For those who want a ZFS based NAS, have a look at NexentaStor (which has a proprietary GUI, free for up to 12 TB of disk) or Nexenta Core (just the OS without GUI, and open source) - NexentaStore has some nice features to get you started quickly, or you can use the open source napp.it GUI with the Nexenta Core. Nexenta uses a very recent zpool version (v24) and is based on OpenSolaris build b134 so it includes the above zpool reocvery feature.
Nexenta generally will move to using the Illumos fork of OpenSolaris when that's stable, so it should have a future as long as NetApp don't sue them. If they do get sued you could move to a more community-based distro based on Illumos.
Key question is whether the ZFS on Linux port will be updated to the Solaris b134 code to include this feature. Without it, you are in for some painful recovery using zdb (filesystem debugger) - but in any case you need up to date backups of your entire zpool. FreeBSD does have ZFS but using a much older zpool version without this feature - from my point of view, it's best to use the latest Solaris ZFS code to get the best stability, despite the limitations of Solaris hardware support.
ZFS recovery is an interesting topic given commodity hardware - see http://opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messageID=292794 - there are other failure modes not addressed buy this zpool recovery feature.
Maybe someone at Oracle started the btrfs project, but there are many contributers to btrfs.
New things are always on the horizon
non-UTF8 in filenames
UTF8 can represent all of Unicode.
I'm not aware of any non-unicode characters.
when it comes to license compatibility issues in general, it is the GPL which is decidedly incompatible with every other license.
That's FUD if I've ever seen FUD. Check out the FSF's list of free software licenses; there's many licenses that ARE GPL-compatible. Excluding the GNU licenses themselves, there's at least Apache 2.0, Artistic 2.0, Berkeley DB, Boost, Modified BSD, CeCILL, Clear BSD, Cryptix, eCos 2.0, Educational Community 2.0, Eiffel Forum 2, EU Datagrid, Expat, FreeBSD (!), FreeType, iMatix, Independent JPEG Group, imlib2, Intel Open Source, ISC, NCSA, Netscape Javascript, OpenLDAP, Perl 5, PD, Python 2, Python up to 1.6, Ruby, SGI B 2.0, SML/NJ, Unicode, VIM 6.1+, w3c, webm, WFTPL 2, X11, XFree86 1.1, zlib and Zope 2.
And keep in mind that these are *licenses*; in reality, most projects won't even bother making up their own licenses. "Decidedly incompatible with every other license". Sheesh!
some GPL advocates tend to view those who choose a non-GPL license as trying to thwart GNU and/or Linux so they don't have to admit that maybe other licenses have terms and conditions that have their own merit.
Who are those mysterious "GPL advocates" you mention, then? Also, what does this have to do with a situation where Sun really WAS trying to "thwart GNU and/or Linux", by its own admission?
Look, the CDDL isn't a bad license per se, and the FSF page linked above lists it as a free software license, too, if a GPL-incompatible one (it does urge you not to use it for that reason, but hey, this *is* the FSF). But the original point was that Sun wanted to make sure that ZFS etc. would not be available on Linux, and they chose/engineered a GPL-incompatible license specifically to ensure that. You're not even contesting that anymore, so why are you still arguing about the whole thing?
It's a fact. Sun didn't want Linux to get ZFS. Get over it.
Comparing hammer to ZFS is also a bit silly. Hammer was developed precisely because ZFS did not solve the problem that DragonflyBSD wanted solved. ZFS is designed for large SANs controlled from a central server. Hammer is designed to allow you to treat every disk on a network as part of the same storage pool. They are diametrically opposed objectives, and a filesystem designed to do both would need to either make painful compromises or have so much variation in code paths that it would effectively be two different filesystems.
You can do something similar with ZFS in FreeBSD, because ZFS slots into the GEOM system and can use any GEOM provider as the backing store, meaning that you can use remote partitions exported over the network, but you'd need a massive amount of configuration and get a lot of fragility for something that hammer does automatically and reliably. Conversely, hammer has incredibly poor performance on a number of workloads where ZFS does very well and doesn't provide the same level of redundancy on a single machine.
Btrfs, at the moment, is largely vapourware. It might become something impressive in the future, but for now it is not.
Either way, porting ZFS to Linux is probably a mistake. The FreeBSD port has some performance issues from the mismatch between the design of the ZFS code and the rest of the kernel, but more importantly it's not as flexible as it could be. ZFS is highly modular. The FreeBSD GEOM stack is also incredibly modular. If you were doing a native ZFS implementation for FreeBSD, you'd rewrite each of the components of ZFS as a separate GEOM module. Instead, the entire ZFS stack is exposed, more or less, as a single GEOM module. A lot of the potential flexibility of ZFS is lost by doing this, but it's done because it's much easier than a complete reimplementation.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Does anybody know, how former Sun strategists think today of their license game?
cb
Note, however, that UTF-8 is optimised for storing the subset of unicode that is common in the US and, to a lesser extent, Europe. For other subsets of unicode, it can be much less space-efficient than UTF-16, requiring three bytes per character instead of two. Of course, the only time this will ever be a problem is if you have a filesystem containing a few billion files with long Japanese filenames and no data. For most of us, the space wasted by UTF-8 in the filename is going to be tiny compared to the space used by the contents of the file.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
ZFS fits amazingly well to Apple's future and their style of computing. Right after this Netapp thing, they switched on "panic mode" and got rid of it. If they had a brain, 10.6 could be running HFSZ now.
Funny is, they will eventually switch to something which has ZFS features, don't forget "be nice to Apple if you want to deal with Disney/Pixar" factor. Some suits will really wonder if it was really worth it when World's trend leader uses something instead of their patents.
They could license it for cheap without hurting their main line of business. It is not like soon World will switch to Xserve blades you know. Apple is a company who can even license "Arial" from MS, a cheap mock up of Helvetica. SJobs isn't exactly rms.
Ohwell, Oracle can always run their database on Linux once they managed to kill Solaris. And by then ZFS on Linux will be good for them ;)
It doesn't sound like there was an agenda against the GPL itself, just the intention to release the code under a license that prevented bundling with Linux.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
No, that's cool. We just don't want it used in any way where the users don't get the code when they want it.
And it was a long time until Firefox showed up on the scene.
True. However, while MSFT was spoon feeding everyone IE5 5.5 & 6, we had the Mozilla Suite 1.7x (02apr03), which became SeaMonkey (30jan06) after Firebird and Thunderbird were forked out of the code base. THEN Firebird was renamed Firefox, an ad was put in the NY Times, and the world started to pay attention.
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
There are a couple in development although I wouldn't use in a production environment just yet:
1) SDFS - http://code.google.com/p/opendedup/
2) LessFS - http://www.lessfs.com/
I think they are both based on FUSE but I'm not entirely sure, I haven't delved that deep into them I was just poking around one random night.
Stick around a while, this might get interesting. I plan to see what happens. btrfs has no encumberances, you are correct about that; but OTOH ZFS is production-tested and proven - and lots of ppl are drooling for it (along with dtrace). The whole legal morass (licensing) is definitely *going* to tie things up for a while though, IMHO. From a historical perspective, you should also remember that Solaris draws from SunOS which SunOS in turn tried to merge the best of SysV and BSD. Which coincidentally Linux also tries to do. So I think it's a good match.
C|N>K
The GPL prevents redistribution of more free combinations as well.
...more free combinations which allow further redistribution of less free combinations, to be more exact.
Without this, GPL would be rather pointless. If somebody wants to keep their code free, and by extension, allow all future users of the code have certain freedoms that come with having the source code (what freedoms exactly, depends on GPL version, due to tivoization), then that's what is needed.
Freedom (of any kind) is not black and white thing, nor is it one-dimensional scale.
Freedom to take freedom away sure is a freedom, but I can see why some would want to restrict that freedom when it's about something they've created and want to remain free.
I used the Mozilla suite for a while (web & mail), but it definitely wasn't a clear win over IE. It was slower, at least for me, much more of a memory hog, and didn't work with as many websites. It was only once Firefox was stable that there was something that was clearly better than IE. I probably switched from a combination of IE/Mozilla to Firefox a bit late into the party, but there were still 3 1/2 years between the release of IE 5 and the release of Firefox (let alone when it became stable; it didn't hit 1.0 for 2 years after that, though it was good before then); during those 3 1/2 years, IE was king IMO.
If you read the ZFS documentation you will understand WHY RAID was built into ZFS. Until then, STFU.
Name one linux distribution that ships zfs as part of the default installation, and installs by default on it.
Surely parity RAID is a function of the MD layer, and replication is a function of LVM?
Only if you're stuck in the LVM-on-Linux mindset, which frankly sucks. There are many reasons why; any of Jeff Bonwick's writings will explain these ZFS design choices. It's also one of the main reasons well-heeled shops run Linux volumes from SANs instead of just using LVM.
For example, LVM snapshots require space reservations, and copy a block to every snapshot with every write. This is extraordinarily slow, and gets worse with each additional snapshot. This makes LVM snapshots effectively unusable for high-volume server systems, where they are needed most.
If you look at the major features of ZFS, none of them apply to phones:
1) pooled storage management
2) integrity + self healing
3) snapshots
etc
To get the real payoffs with ZFS you need to have device redundancy. Also, a ZFS stack likes a lot of RAM. There's no real reason to run it on a phone or even a laptop (for most people). There are plenty of suitable filesystems for these situations.
you had me at #!
But it's aimed at the bigger system/server market, which does tend to be 64 bit. The 32 bit end is not going to get as much love.
Also see what TheRaven64 wrote above.
you had me at #!
.... you rarely have to make a volume smaller.
Try to add a new device to one of the pools on a system. Intend to write:
# zpool add mediapool /dev/newdisk
...but accidentally pull this up from your shell history:
# zpool add bigassraid /dev/newdisk
Panic when you realize that you just told the system to load-balance operations between that 64-drive RAID and a 160GB PATA drive you were screwing around with, and that you can't remove the new drive without backing up and restoring the whole RAID.
I love ZFS, but I despise the fact that you can't undo operations that seem like they should be very undoable.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
... there was much of it. Very much of it!
So has everything else in production today. What's next, it'll absorb the best features of Windows 95?
Porting ZFS to Linux is only a mistake for those who don't like ZFS or Linux... I am contemplating a new Solaris / NexentaStor NAS just to get access to ZFS, but it would be much easier if it was available in Linux within the kernel.
I am also capable of making a politically loaded definition of freedom that fits my goals but then I would feel like a dirty car salesman who writes his own definition of one year warranty that is out of line with the common meaning.
I don't want a file system that is described as not that unstable really. I'll take just plain stable thank you.
Looks like some folks try very hard to notice a very simple fact: that in every case involving license incompatibility one of the parties is always GPL. There are GPL-compatible licenses, there are GPL-incompatible licenses, but there are no e.g. Mozilla-incompatible licenses other than GPL. In other words - in the Open Source world license incompatibility problem just doesn't occur when not dealing with GPL. Also, GPL-incompatibility is not the only problem with that license. GPL code cannot be incorporated into software licensed under most GPL-compatible licenses, such as BSD, Apache, Xorg, whatever. But I digress.
Actualy, CDDL is years ahead of Btrfs _wishlist_. Looks like Btrfs developers didn't even start thinking about e.g. hybrid pools yet, or proper support for SMB shares (including NFSv4 ACL support), or deduplication.
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