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Ubuntu Plans To Make ZFS File-System Support Standard On Linux
An anonymous reader writes: Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth revealed today that they're planning to make ZFS standard on Ubuntu. They are planning to include ZFS file-system as "standard in due course," but no details were revealed beyond that. However, ZFS On Linux contributor Richard Yao has said they do plan on including it in their kernel for 16.04 LTS and the GPL vs. CDDL license worries aren't actually a problem. Many Linux users have been wanting ZFS on Linux, but aside from the out of tree module there hasn't been any luck in including it in the mainline kernel or with tier-one Linux distributions due to license differences.
Why would you need nvidia drivers on a file server? Use Ubuntu Server, it's made for, well, being a server.
What was the Nvidia video driver doing on a server?
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
I run ZFS on any / every machine I can, server or not. That is one filesystem where the features outweigh all possible concerns.
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
is anything like "ZFS will be the default". He just said that it would be in the distro.
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www.n1ywb.com
I don't why so many in the Linux community are so hooked on ZFS. BTRFS has a feature set that is rapidly getting there, its becoming more a more mature in terms of code that is already in the upstream.
Why not just put your energy there?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
So how are they doing this without license conflict? Are they doing a clean-room implementation of ZFS?
My file server has a very low-end nVidia graphics card in it. There was some sort of issue with the stock drivers that shipped with the distro, such that I got no video output at all, and I don't have any GUI installed, just text-mode console. I had to install the nVidia drivers to get it working.
Being unable to SSH into my Ubuntu file server was usually the first indication that the automatic update went FUBAR. The black screen from the video card didn't help either.
To name a few: A variety of flavors of built-in RAID / replication. Built in error detection and correction. Snapshots. The ability to send and receive deltas between snapshots from one server to another.
A typical home Linux server - AKA an old PC - won't have IPMI. Actual servers typically will have IPMI, but they cost $BIG_BUCKS$. And even then, IPMI is extremely limited.
On the Dell servers I bought a few months ago I can't do anything useful with it beyond power on/off or text-only console redirection over serial (over LAN) before the OS loads (I can get into BIOS and the RAID controller ROM, not much else).
Unless of course I pony up more cash for their iDRAC Standard/Pro/Enterprise/etc. shit. THEN I can get graphical console redirection, some storage space to flash firmware from, and even USB/optical drive redirection.
It makes other FSs look like FAT32.
This is what I wonder as well.
What's frustrating is that it's not the ZFS license that's the problem. It's the GPL. Oracle couldn't give a flying fuck if someone put ZFS into the Linux kernel, but the GPL zealots would probably raise a huge stink about it and keep it from happening.
For the record, I support open source; I just don't like the "viral" nature of the GPL. The ZFS situation is a case where it's doing more harm than good.
Sorry but that's simply not true. It was Sun and now Oracle that purposely chose an incompatible license for ZFS. Nothing to do with the GPL here. Your complaints are like the people that buy up land around an airport, build houses, and then complain about the noise.
Anyway, if you read the fine articles you'd discover that what Ubuntu is going to do is include ZoL modules in their kernel packages. This takes advantage of GPLv2's aggregation clause which lets you ship non GPL binaries with GPL'd binaries because they aren't linked together (think an OS distribution). Once the modules get loaded, that taints the kernel but since it's the end user that initiates this by choosing to use ZFS, there's no copyright violation. ZoL has always operated this way, actually.
In other words ZoL will not be compiled into the kernel, as to do so by Ubuntu would be a license violation. But Ubuntu plans to ship and support the binary kernel modules. Sounds eminently reasonable to me. Hopefully we'll see this approach adopted by other distributions, athough ZoL is not that hard to get running at all.
ZFS wasn't design for mobile systems. FreeNAS requires a minimum of 8GB RAM and 1GB per every 1TB of raw storage for optimal ZFS performance.
So that's three-strikes... You're 1) using a regular PC as a server (no IPMI), 2) that PC doesn't even have a serial port to be used as an OoBM console, and finally 3) you've got some issue with the video card not even displaying text-mode. With all three strikes against your server, I just can't muster any sympathy for the predicament you put yourself in, relying on an unsuitable cheap piece of crap equipment.
In fact it's probably FOUR strikes... Presumably your video problem was an issue with KMS or similar, and 4) you didn't bother to figure out how to fix/disable/bypass it, and use plan old text-mode. Instead you went with the quickest (but obviously flawed and easily breakable) option of depending on a proprietary video driver. That's just not thinking things through. Reminds me of folks who has just a switchable PDU as their sole method of OoBM... works right up until they acidentally do a clean shutdown of a remote server.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Regardless of what Ubuntu has convinced themselves of, in this context the ZFS filesystem driver would be an unlicensed derivative work. If they don't want it to be so, it needs to be in user-mode instead of loaded into the kernel address space and using unexported APIs of the kernel.
A lot of people try to deceive themselves (and you) that they can do silly things, like putting an API between software under two licenses, and that such an API becomes a "computer condom" that protects you from the GPL. This rationale was never true and was overturned by the court in the appeal of Oracle v. Google.
Bruce Perens.
As someone who has 50TB on a system with 16GB ram i agree with you.
I wish people would stop spreading this "1gb ram/tb" FUD.
It is the recommendation for DEDUP, not for standard ZFS.
No. RAID isn't better handled at other layers. If you don't know about the filesystem semantics then you need NVRAM or journalling at the block level to avoid the RAID-5 write hole. RAID-Z doesn't have this problem. If you're recovering a failed block-level RAID, then you need to copy all of the data, including unused space. With ZFS RAID (all levels), you only copy the used data. There are numerous other advantages to rearranging the layers, including being a lot more flexible in the provisioning.
It's also a mistake to think of ZFS as a layer. ZFS has three layers: the lowest handles physical disks and presents a linear address space, the middle presents a transactional object store, and the top presents something that looks like a filesystem (or a block device, which is useful for things like VM disk images).
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When I tested wireless clients at Cisco, I installed the GUI with Fedora or Mint because I needed to run YouTube video in a loop. The division chief wanted to fire me for using 75% of the wireless bandwidth for YouTube. He didn't realize that I had 30 laptops running YouTube video and supporting 300 users without a hiccup in network performance. All the YouTube videos were from the Cisco channel, which included several interview with him. Nothing like seeing your face on 30 screens.
Wow, with all the hostile responses your post has been getting, I almost started thinking that I had joined the LKML by mistake.
One GREAT advantage it has over your bog-standards filesystems like NTFS and ext4 is its copy-on-write architecture, and the essentially free and near-instant snapshot system it provides.
When you take a snapshot of a filesystem, it simply makes a copy of the superblock. All of the space on the devices remain marked as in-use, and both snapshots share exactly the same physical storage.
When you make a change to one of the snapshots, it simply writes the changed blocks to a different location on the underlying devices and leaves the still-in-use original block alone.
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.