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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)
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, 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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
Obviously other people don't share your high regard for the current state of BtrFS in relation to ZFS. I wonder why that is?
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.
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
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.
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.