3 ms·
I imagine the wait was mostly that it wasn't deemed necessary to have ZFS on Ubuntu until now. Containerisation has drastically increased interest in CoW files
by jpgvm 11y ago
I imagine the wait was mostly that it wasn't deemed necessary to have ZFS on Ubuntu until now.
Containerisation has drastically increased interest in CoW filesystems. Traditionally their only use-case has been for implementing livecds and similar ro + rw layer environments.
For this AUFS has been the gold standard since basically forever. However AUFS has some flaws and lack of features that make it undesirable to use in production container workloads, hence looking to ZFS to fill this gap.
- opk 11y agoNote that AUFS has been succeeded by overlayfs which, unlike the various earlier union fs attempts, has actually been merged into the kernel. I'm not sure where it stands with regard to flaws
- mjg59 11y agoIt's pretty flawed - for example, if you open a file read-only, open it again read-write and the write to it, any read from the first file descriptor won't show the writes. The corner cases don't bite people under most circumstances, but when they do they're awful.
- vetrom 11y agoThat sounds like a fairly normal structured file/multiprocess workload, not much of a corner case there :(
- nathwill 11y agoits still pretty raw. check out cve-2015-8660, which basically let unprivileged users bypass normal file permissions without even trying. it's fixed in mainline now, but still hasn't hit a lot of distros.