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Making ZFS and DTrace Work On Ubuntu Linux
New submitter Liberum Vir writes "Many of the people that I talk with who use Solaris-like systems mention ZFS and DTrace as the reasons they simply cannot move to Linux. So, I set out to discover how to make these two technologies work on the latest LTS release of Ubuntu. It turned out to be much easier than I expected. The ports of these technologies have come a long way. If you or someone you know is addicted to a Solaris-like system because of ZFS and DTrace, please, inquire within."
The whole GPL/CDDL issue is still around, however, since the CDDL code is not added to the Linux Kernel, but instead a loadable kernel module distributed separately, it is possible to satisfy both the GPL of the Linux Kernel and the CDDL of ZFS and DTrace. Because of the incompatibility of CDDL with the GPL, you could not distribute a complete system using of Linux, ZFS, and DTrace. You can, however, distribute packages to allow people to build it themselves. This is what the authors of these projects have done.
I haven't done any performance testing so far. My objective with this was just as a proof of concept, if you will. I'm sure, if you are having kernel panics and absurdly slow IO/transfer speeds, the developers would welcome your input to make it better. Personally, I prefer LVM and ext4 for most uses. Again, this was more just to prove that it could be done.
I just looked at this article as my employer uses Debian and Ubuntu heavily and I've been pushing for ZFS on our file servers. There is no mention of ZFS version, the feature set available, or even a link to the source material.
ZoL is based on ZFS version 28 from the last open Solaris release, and currently integrating Illumos as its upstream.
There isn't much mention of how to use ZFS. I happen to know most commands, but I think this article would be difficult for a beginner even though it seems to be targeted at that demographic.
It looks like the Slashdot editors are doing this blogger a favor by linking to a mostly empty article.
At a minimum, this article should link to the ZoL home page, the ZoL Launchpad page for packages, and maybe the ZFS introduction or another tutorial.
So was Java, and Google just spent roughly a bazillion dollars defending themselves for using something that looked like it. I can't afford to take on a case like that.
So you take the Oracle vs. Google case as Oracle eventually going after individual users of legitimately licensed code?
Nonsense.
As much as I think Larry Ellison is a douchebag, he is motivated by profit. The results of this last case were less than optimum for him, going away from the case with bupkis and a bunch of fees from BS&F. Alsup also established he fact that independent implementation of APIs are not copyright violations, ever, under current law, which had not been proven until now, which is a big win for everyone including Google, and a stupendous loss for Oracle.
Larry Ellison learned an expensive (David Boies doesn't come cheap) lesson here, that even his bluster and hubris doesn't win court cases.
Google was not the loser here.
ZFS and btrfs have free licenses and it's tough to put the worms back in the can once something is under a free license. Forks happen. Look at what happened to OpenOffice and Libre Office. Sure, Oracle can close off future code, but Very Useful Stuff like this gets forked by the community. There are enough smart people poking around in the guts of ZFS and btrfs that *do not* work for Oracle and the projects will continue on in the community even if only to give Oracle the finger.
Your fears are overblown.
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BMO
I use ZFS on Ubuntu 11.10 in "production" for my main workstation and fileserver with a 3x3TB raidz pool with an L2 ARC. I/O is blindingly fast, and it has been rock solid. It serves about 10 machines, and feels an order of magnitude faster than the md/lvm based xfs array it replaced.
I write 10GbE drivers for Linux, MacOSX, FreeBSD and Solaris. I make heavy use of Dtrace for both debugging and performance analysis. I feel naked without Dtrace, and I've used the linux dtrace a few times for debugging. Unfortunately, I've never had dtrace run on linux for more than a few minutes without crashing a machine. This is not necessarily bad, and often just a few seconds is all I need. But I would never run linux Dtrace on any production machine, whereas I use it all the time under Solaris / FreeBSD and MacOSX and often have customers run Dtrace probes on those OSes to diagnose issues.