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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.
Hell, it's already in many cases a superior experience on Linux, starting with that you can shrink a BTFS volume but you still can't shrink a ZFS volume. I suppose in the enterprise-centric world that ZFS is aimed at that's pretty much never an issue, but I've even run into it personally multiple times myself working for a small business and have been glad that I was running BTRFS instead. Frankly, for many use-cases it seems like running ZFS on Linux is more hassle for the sake of then more hassle later on.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
It's really quite simple. ZFS is a great filesystem. It's reliable, performant, featureful, and very well documented. Btrfs has a subset of the ZFS featureset, but fails on all the other counts. It has terrible documentation and it's one of the least reliable and least performant filesystems I've ever used. Having used both extensively over several years, and hammered both over long periods, I've suffered from repeated Btrfs dataloss and performance problems. ZFS on the other hand has worked well from day one, and I've yet to experience any problems. Neither are as fast as ext4 on single discs, but you're getting resilience and reliability, not raw speed, and it scales well as you add more discs; exactly what I want for storing my data. And having a filesystem which works on several operating systems has a lot of value. I took the discs comprising a ZFS zpool mirror from my Linux system and slotted them into a FreeBSD NAS. One command to import the pool (zpool import) and it was all going. Later on I added l2arc and zil (cache and log) SSDs to make it faster, both one command to add and also entirely trouble-free.
Over the years there have been lots of publicity about the Btrfs featureset and development. But as you said in your comment that it's "rapidly getting there". That's been the story since day one. And it's not got there. Not even close. Until its major bugs and unfortunate design flaws (getting unbalanced to unusability, silly link limits) are fixed, it will never get there. I had high hopes for Btrfs, and I was rewarded with severe dataloss or complete unusability each and every time I tried it over the years since it was started. Eventually I switched to ZFS out of a need for something that actually worked and could be relied upon. Maybe it will eventually become suitable for serious production use, but I lost hope of that a good while back.
Nearly all of the original Sun devs that created ZFS in the first place, still work on OpenZFS full time and are paid to do so. OpenZFS is very actively developed. They have 2 or more presentations per year about all of the changes they're constantly making and some of the upcoming big changes. Currently they are focusing on standardizing ZFS between FreeBSD, Luminos, and Linux. It's a large refactoring effort to have all ZFS's code bases to live in the same tree. One OpenZFS code tree for all OSes. Everyone will be in sync.
While you can't shrink ZFS pools because they cannot do that atomically, and they refuse to do anything that allows the end user to shoot themselves in the foot, like leaving the FS in an inconsistent state, you can create a new pool that is smaller and import your larger pool into the smaller one, as long as it fits. Can't do it in-place, but you can do it. It just sucks to do that with a 1PiB+ pool. But who shrinks those?