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Ubuntu 16.04 LTS To Have Official Support For ZFS File System (dustinkirkland.com)

Posted by timothy on from the options-are-good dept.

LichtSpektren writes: Ubuntu developer Dustin Kirkland has posted on his blog that Canonical plans to officially support the ZFS file system for the next Ubuntu LTS release, 16.04 "Xenial Xerus." The file system, which originates in Solaris UNIX, is renowned for its feature set (Kirkland touts "snapshots, copy-on-write cloning, continuous integrity checking against data corruption, automatic repair, efficient data compression") and its stability. "You'll find zfs.ko automatically built and installed on your Ubuntu systems. No more DKMS-built modules!" N.B. ext4 will still be the default file system due to the unresolved licensing conflict between Linux's GPLv2 and ZFS's CDDL.

4 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. BTRFS by ssam · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'll stick with BTRFS thanks. It gives me all those features, is GPL and has been trouble free for me on many TB of disks for several years.

  2. Re:For home users, basically meaningless. by Curunir_wolf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think you don't know what ZFS really is. It's a very different deal than etx4, ufs etc... It is the file system that made HW raid controllers obsolete.

    It also made just about any computer with less than 8 GB of RAM obsolete. It's also not very friendly with applications that need large chunks of RAM, like a database or large Java VM application - the ARC cache causes a lot of fragmentation and is often slow to release it when other applications need more.

    --
    "Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
    --- Jerry Garcia
  3. Re:For home users, basically meaningless. by Aaden42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    On 64-bit hosts, the ARC cache is a non-issue. Java needs contiguous *virtual* memory space. Physical memory fragmentation isn't a problem w/ the MMU translating contiguous 64-bit address space to possibly non-contiguous physical pages. On 32-bit hosts, that gets dicey. On 64-bit, you've got plenty of room even w/ ARC.

    That said, I'd love to see ARC & the native Linux disk cache functionality either merge or at least have ARC behave more like the normal caching mechanism (IE free up RAM more eagerly), but it's not actually caused me significant problems on 64-bit.

  4. Re:For home users, basically meaningless. by The-Ixian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I used MythTV for years as a DVR and I tried a lot of different file systems.

    The 2 that always worked the best were JFS and XFS for the sole reason that large file deletes took almost no time at all. Compared to several seconds or even minutes with other file systems.

    --
    My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.