10 ms·

Big News for ZFS on Linux

222 points by bcantrill 11y ago

unethical_ban 11y ago
Hug of Death on the site as of 1250 CST
static_noise 11y ago
This was in the news before. What's the big new thing about this article? It reads like a writeup of the news of yesterday. Also, ZFS is not coming to Linux as such, it's coming to Ubuntu specifically and the article does not clear up the detail why this is now possible for Ubuntu but was not possible for the rest of the Linux community.
- andreaso 11y ago
  I'd imagine there are people who consider the article relevant based on its author. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Leventhal_%28programmer%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Leventhal_%28programmer%2...
- dyladan 11y ago
  AFAIK they are saying that because it is a DKMS module and Linux is not a derivative work, they are not restricted from using it by the license. By Canonical's interpretation, it would only become an issue if they were to build the support directly into the kernel natively rather than using a standalone zfs.ko file. Keep in mind IANAL and this is just my limited understanding of the issue.
- jerf 11y ago
  Am I really reading this correctly, that the plan seems to be "ignore the possible license incompatibility and hope Oracle doesn't sue?" Because of all ways to fill in the "Hope _____ doesn't sue" plan, "Oracle" must be in the top 5 worst companies to fill in the blank with in the tech industry.
  - adamleventhal 11y ago
    Agreed on the second point, but no one (to my knowledge) is contending that Oracle's copyrights or patents are being violated.
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    I'm not a lawyer or an expert on the CDDL, however it could be that the license incompatibility is one-way: maybe only the GPL rightsholders have reason to sue.
    - espadrine 11y ago
      Unfortunately, Oracle also holds copyright in Linux, so they can sue as a GPL rightsholder. The real question is whether Oracle could convince a jury. It is hard to imagine what their argument would be. Then again, I would have never imagined that they would use copyright law over APIs to attack Google's use of Java.
  - Sanddancer 11y ago
    No, the plan was, "have the lawyers evaluate the possible license incompatibility, decide that the really isn't one, and release the module." The SFLC is essentially running a FUD campaign here by trying to paint Canonical as being reckless.
    - jerf 11y ago
      I phrased it as a "possible license incompatibility" very carefully. I'm personally ambivalent about whether it is; I know enough to know I don't know. And even those who think they know will generally agree that you don't really know know until it is tested in court. The real problem here is that Oracle is the sort of company that does "test it in court". Is Canonical really big enough to be able to afford this level of risk? Even if they win I would be surprised if they managed to talk the judge into awarding them lawyer costs from Oracle. There's definitely enough ambiguity here that it wouldn't be a stupid suit. Legally, anyhow.
    - chei0aiV 11y ago
- derefr 11y ago
  One nice thing about things "coming to Ubuntu specifically" is that a lot of people get used to what Linux is "like" through Ubuntu. So when Ubuntu does something, people start looking for that thing whenever they use Linux generally. It generates demand, which pushes changes through.
- dsp1234 11y ago
  ZFS is not coming to Linux as such, it's coming to Ubuntu specifically This is a faulty understanding of the issue. Other distros such as Debian are packaing 'ZFS on Linux'. Ubuntu is not the first one to offer the ability to have ZFS on Linux in the distros main repository. The difference is actually that the other distros distribute the ZFS code as source, then have the user compile it on their own computer, and then those distros consider that end product as non-redistributable. Whereas Ubunutu is doing the compilation on their own, then distributing the resulting binary work. That's the actual difference.
  - ryao 11y ago
    Sabayon Linux has been shipping binary modules for years. No one has ever complained.
- adamleventhal 11y ago
  It's a fair critique though I didn't write this because I thought I was breaking news. The Canonical announcement was honestly exciting for me, in particular because they evaluated the licensing issues and decided that they were within their rights to provide ZFS to their users. It seemed though that the voices of practitioners was being drowned out by those focusing exclusively on legal matters. I was hoping to provide some information for those unacquainted with both the technology and the legal miasma. Regardless, I'm excited that ZFS is about to have many more users.
jinxedID 11y ago
Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:scs1wYblGe0J:dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/03/07/big-news-for-zfs-on-linux/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:scs1wYb...
NoGravitas 11y ago
I suspect "Just ignore the licences and focus on the technology" is not going to fly with enterprise customers.
- VonGuard 11y ago
  Totally correct. However, it may fly just fine with Ubuntu's "just install a damn Linux and get the app online" crowd. Ubuntu makes Linux easy to install and maintain, and that could be enough for some users. They only need one or two giant apps to grow here in order for it to be called a success.
- jra_samba 11y ago
  Yep. It's all fun and games until the lawsuits start :-). I don't understand people like this. If they were advocating using pirate copies of Microsoft Windows or other proprietary software, would they be saying "ignore Microsoft legal department and focus on how cool it is that I get a free copy of Windows ? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
  - adamleventhal 11y ago
    Lots of people do exactly that. In fact, many companies even use software for which the licenses have lapsed or they never owned licenses in the first place. Sometimes it's by accident; in other cases it's a knowing acceptance of risk.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    I don't think that's a relevant comparison at all. What we have here is two open source technologies that have traditionally been kept from being used together because of specific clauses in their licenses, and some lawyers who have looked at it and are vouching that it's not a problem. That's far from ignoring the proprietary closed source, for-profit licensing of a product where it's very clear cut. The lawyers may be wrong, and it's probably a good idea for enterprise customers to steer clear, but the whole point is that there is some valid contention over whether the technologies can be used together. There is not valid contention over whether you can use Windows without a license.
gtirloni 11y ago
What's the situation on btrfs? It was supposed to make ZFS not that big deal anymore on Linux.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  It would if done, but it's not quite there yet.
- joshbaptiste 11y ago
  Depends on which mailing list you read, the usual consensus I see is it's kinda production ready, though openSUSE has switched to Btrfs as its main file system.
  - cyphar 11y ago
    [Disclaimer: I work for SUSE] SUSE Linux Enterprise also uses btrfs by default. There's also a bunch of features like booting into snapshots and snapper (snapshots taken before zypper transactions and on regular intervals with decaying granularity) which are in both OpenSUSE and SLE.
- tristanz 11y ago
  I can confirm that btrfs has major problems with tons of snapshots. The entire system will hang for minutes on random intervals and go completely unresponsive for hours when using admin commands. The many snapshots use case is pretty common when dealing with containers, even it everything works fine for simple setups.
  - cmurf 11y ago
    How many is tons? I've not had such problems with hundreds of snapshots. There are reports on the btrfs list with problems involving many thousands. I have no idea how ZFS snapshots perform when there are hundreds to thousands. The other thing that matters a ton is kernel version, the development is so heavy there are thousands of insertions+deletions per kernel cycle that even in a year it's ordinary to consider those kernels "old" on the list. Most distros by default use old kernels by Btrfs development standards. The exception is Fedora, and openSUSE who do lots of backports explicitly to support Btrfs.
bladerunner82 11y ago
ZFS on Linux. No, thank you. I'll continue to use ZFS natively under FreeBSD, which is arguably a far better OS for what ZFS users would be wanting anyway. Been using *BSD since the late 90s. Never a real issue short of HW failure. I cannot say the same for the painful times I was forced to use Linux. ZFS is indeed a lifesaver, but we in the BSD camps have know this for many moons.
- matthewmacleod 11y ago
  This is a relatively useless contribution to the discussion. Given that there are obviously reasons why Linux has been successful while BSDs have seen less popular usage, it must be the case that Linux or its ecosystem offers features not found elsewhere. Adding ZFS to Ubuntu is a benefit to everybody, and a smug, holier-than-thou attitude really does nothing to further the conversation about the technology.
  - jra_samba 11y ago
    Nope. Adding a legally licensed copy of ZFS to Ubuntu is a benefit to everybody. Oracle haven't seen fit to do that, and they're the only ones who can. Sticking a hack-licensing-job into Ubuntu is damaging to the Linux ecosystem, certainly not a benefit.
    - dsp1234 11y ago
      they're the only ones who can. This is true, in the same way that it's true that the US could vote in a constitutional amendment to allow a dictatorship. First, Oracle only has the copyright to the original ZFS code as it existed in 2010 when they stopped working on OpenSolaris. Second, the AUTHORS[0] file from the 'zfs on linux' project that was imported into ubuntu lists 73 authors not including the Oracle developers, which appear to be both individuals (gmail accounts, etc) and multiple individual businesses (nexenta, ovh, etc). So Oracle cannot naively relicense those 6+ years of contributions, since they have no copyright over that new code. Thus changing the license of the original ZFS code would have no effect because all of the years of contributions since then would still be licensed as CDDL. Third, Oracle does have exactly one 'option'. The details of the CDDL license specifically state that is 'auto upgrades' if a new version comes out, and an older version is not specifically mentioned. So theoretically, they could release a CDDL license version 1.3 that has radically updated text in order to be GPL compatible. However, since that effects all CDDL licensed code, they would end up relicensing every bit of CDDL code (related to Oracle or not) in the entire world. Is that something that Oracle should reasonable be expected to do? I think this is as likely, and as reasonable, as GPL v4 coming out with the text of the MIT license, thus affecting any GPL code in the world that says 'or any later version'. In other words, it's just not reasonable to use this 'one weird trick'. So there is no remotely reasonable way in which Oracle can have an effect on this issue. [0] - http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git/ubuntu/ubuntu-xenial.git/diff/zfs/AUTHORS?id=b65ce14d3445e8fe69b5d59aaaf2699319714179 http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git/ubuntu/ubuntu-xenial.git/diff/z...
skrowl 11y ago
Can I have big news on ZFS (or BTRFS) for Windows now? I've heard how awesome this filesystem is, but I still can't use it.
- michaelmrose 11y ago
  Seems unlikely that either will ever come to windows guess you should check out ReFS or install Linux https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS#/search https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS#/search
  - ryao 11y ago
    The O3X project lead has joked about porting ZFS to Windows after he finished the Mac OS X port. That is the only discussion of porting it to Windows thus far, although there was one guy who tried reimplementing it as a userspace filesystem on Windows, but that did not get far.
- ThatPlayer 11y ago
  https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs This guy is writing a windows driver for Btrfs
wpietri 11y ago
My favorite quote from the piece: "And it is the height of delusion to think that Oracle would grow ears to hear, a heart to care, and a brain to decide." And this is coming from a former Oracle employee.
asendra 11y ago
Now, how 'bout them Apples err Macs?
- srgpqt 11y ago
  https://openzfsonosx.org/ https://openzfsonosx.org/
jordigh 11y ago
I know it seem silly to care about licensing in this case, since it's about GPL incompatibility between two free licenses. However, the problem here is the precedent that it sets. If ZFS distributed this way, in binary form linked to Linux, does not infringe Linux's copyleft, then this could open the doors for other kinds of proprietary blobs to grow on top of Linux. That is SFC's analysis, Indeed, Conservancy believes this situation is one battle in a larger proxy war by those who seek to limit the scope of strong copyleft generally. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/ I also fear about what Oracle could do, as they are copyright holders of parts of Linux (btrfs) and might decide to make things difficult for Canonical. Oracle has misused copyleft aggressively in the past, trying to strong-arm people into buying GPL exceptions for MySQL when they didn't need one, although in this case, they probably do have a good case for why a GPL exception would be necessary.
- dbcurtis 11y ago
  So, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the license incompatibility related to shipping binaries of zfs? If a user chooses to compile locally from zfs sources, then the license issues don't apply, correct? So this is not an issue for, say, Gentoo, Funtoo, LFS, etc, and only an issue for Canonical because they are not interested in a mechanism that allows users to build packages from source, am I correct? I'm thinking something something along the lines of "Here is a tarball containing the sources and a container instance you can spin up. It leaves a .deb behind." What part of this am I missing?
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    On ArchLinux, a user (big shout-out to demizer) maintains a set of ZFS packages on AUR that basically do this (build from Git). On Arch, installing ZFS is a one-liner, e.g. $ yaourt -S zfs-git Here is the source for the build script for the zfs-git package: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=zfs-git https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=zfs-g...
    - 11y ago
sarath749 11y ago
Real useful
sarath749 11y ago
zsf?
DCKing 11y ago
Last I joined in on the discussion I got quite convinced by the argument "if Nvidia can use a propietary license for their Linux graphics driver, then Canonical can use the CDDL for their ZFS driver". Substitute for any other propietary modules that people like to load in their Linux kernels. Can anyone point me out why this argument is wrong? Googling around for this I was actually suprised that propietary kernel modules are in fact a debated topic (obviously to little success of the opponents), but doesn't the practical existence of propietary kernel modules at least show that no-one has had a problem with this for a long time, legally speaking?
- mschwaig 11y ago
  The problem is not the use per se, the problem is delivering them to the user as one blob of software together. This is not a problem with proprietary graphics drivers, since you can just download them after setting up you system. However, if you want to boot from a ZFS disk, you need the ZFS driver and the only way to obtain it at that point is effectively from the installation medium.
  - DCKing 11y ago
    OK, fair enough. So distributions that ship the Nvidia drivers in their distro install image (AFAICT OpenELEC does this, not Canonical though) should be in trouble then? And Canonical would find a way around this by autodownloading the ZFS driver when the user select the "ZFS" option in the installer?
    - mschwaig 11y ago
      IANAL but as far as I can tell there is no legal precedent here and so the questions you raise can only be answered by a lawsuit. Sure there is 'technically' a difference between packaging the ZFS driver with Ubuntu and audodownloading it, but it all depends on how a court sees it, because as long as there is no precedent you can't get off on a technicality like this.
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    This isn't quite correct. Nothing really prevents the LiveUSB distribution from writing to itself under ext3, build the ZFS during installation, then use the binary compiled from this process to set it up on the actual SSDs/HDDs. This is legally essentially the same binary blob Nvidia driver as you aren't distributing the binary. I'm assuming the reason this wasn't done was due to the convenience + you'd need to setup the USB like: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD/Persistence https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD/Persistence But once you compiled it on the persistent partition, you'd be able to perform the installation just fine legally and technically is my understanding.
ericfrederich 11y ago
on by default != default filesystem right?
fibo 11y ago
I hope this fixes the "read only filesystem" issue.
shmerl 11y ago
And here I was hoping (somewhat) that big news by now would be Oracle relicensing OpenZSF under GPL :))
nailer 11y ago
> Canonical had their lawyers review the licenses and deemed their use of Linux and OpenZFS to be in compliance. So Canonical, a tiny desktop-focused Linux company, have discovered something that Red Hat's well paid lawyers have missed?
- rwmj 11y ago
  Red Hat have $billions more to lose.
- ryao 11y ago
  Do you have a legal statement from Redhat's lawyers? So far, all I heard about their opinions has been hearsay from third parties.
  - nailer 11y ago
    The proof is in the pudding: no major company has ever shipped zfs on Linux in the last decade, nor will they in the next decade.
git-pull 11y ago
> Oracle holds a copyright on most of OpenZFS since it was forked from the original ZFS code base. It would be within their rights to decide to relicense ZFS under the GPL. Why imply it should convert to GPL? It could become GPL compatible by making the license more permissive. https://blogs.oracle.com/chandan/entry/copyrights_licenses_and_cddl_illustrated https://blogs.oracle.com/chandan/entry/copyrights_licenses_a... "A common misconception is about CDDL and GPL incompatibility. (Incompatibility in the sense: to combine two source files, one under GPL and another under CDDL, to create a common executable.) GPL is incompatible with most licenses like Mozilla Public License, Apache, and CDDL. GPL wants you erase those licenses and use GPL in that place, where as these licenses do not permit erasing them. Hence the incompatibility deadlock."
- gcb0 11y ago
  irrelevant politics, but if you aim to be included in the kernel at some point, you must go for GPL or live with "kernel tainted" messages. which i think is great.
  - mioelnir 11y ago
    Which is the core of the argument. ZFS is simply not aimed at being included in the kernel at some point. Linux user's just wish it were so.
SirMaster 11y ago
What about Proxmox? They are a commercial slightly modified Debian distro who have been shipping ZFS with their ISOs and ready to use out of the box, even from the installer wizard for zfs on root installs for around a year now. Nobody has said anything about them doing this or sued them or tried to stop them. They are distributing the ZFS on linux binary kernel module pre-instated as Canonical is about to do with Ubuntu.
- jethro_tell 11y ago
  Who? Edit: Oracle seems to have very little reason to do anything for precedent. Canonical is both competition and a largish business, that would be done for the money, suing proxmox would look like being a bully.
mankash666 11y ago
Why ZFS on Linux when FreeBSD ships with ZFS by default, without any legal quagmires? Also, we need a real open-source, non-GPL competitor to Linux if there's any hope of not being taken hostage by overzealous GPL enforcement by SFC and other GPL right-wingers.
carapace 11y ago
"Ignore pedants who would deride your pragmatic use of technology as heretical or immoral." That sounds like bad advice.
newman314 11y ago
"Lawyerly cosplay" ROFLMAO
Zardoz84 11y ago
And there is an appreciable performance difference between using ZFS and BtrFS ?
- DominoTree 11y ago
  Massive under certain use cases, and major reliability and feature differences too. A lot of BtrFS is still "in progress" like the copy-on-write stuff and fault detection.
  - Zardoz84 11y ago
    Actually I'm using BtrFS on a few Ubuntu server 14.04 virtual machines. It's very nice when I need to add extra hard disk space, and I only need to add or expand de the virtual hard disk, and indicate to the filesystem to append the extra new space. Also, transparent compression comes very useful, on special when our applications are very dependent on I/O performance and need to store a lot of write single time/read a lot of times data.

222 points by bcantrill 11y ago

Hug of Death on the site as of 1250 CST

This was in the news before. What's the big new thing about this article? It reads like a writeup of the news of yesterday. Also, ZFS is not coming to Linux as such, it's coming to Ubuntu specifically and the article does not clear up the detail why this is now possible for Ubuntu but was not possible for the rest of the Linux community.

andreaso 11y ago
I'd imagine there are people who consider the article relevant based on its author. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Leventhal_%28programmer%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Leventhal_%28programmer%2...
dyladan 11y ago
AFAIK they are saying that because it is a DKMS module and Linux is not a derivative work, they are not restricted from using it by the license. By Canonical's interpretation, it would only become an issue if they were to build the support directly into the kernel natively rather than using a standalone zfs.ko file. Keep in mind IANAL and this is just my limited understanding of the issue.
jerf 11y ago
Am I really reading this correctly, that the plan seems to be "ignore the possible license incompatibility and hope Oracle doesn't sue?" Because of all ways to fill in the "Hope _____ doesn't sue" plan, "Oracle" must be in the top 5 worst companies to fill in the blank with in the tech industry.
- adamleventhal 11y ago
  Agreed on the second point, but no one (to my knowledge) is contending that Oracle's copyrights or patents are being violated.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  I'm not a lawyer or an expert on the CDDL, however it could be that the license incompatibility is one-way: maybe only the GPL rightsholders have reason to sue.
  - espadrine 11y ago
    Unfortunately, Oracle also holds copyright in Linux, so they can sue as a GPL rightsholder. The real question is whether Oracle could convince a jury. It is hard to imagine what their argument would be. Then again, I would have never imagined that they would use copyright law over APIs to attack Google's use of Java.
- Sanddancer 11y ago
  No, the plan was, "have the lawyers evaluate the possible license incompatibility, decide that the really isn't one, and release the module." The SFLC is essentially running a FUD campaign here by trying to paint Canonical as being reckless.
  - jerf 11y ago
    I phrased it as a "possible license incompatibility" very carefully. I'm personally ambivalent about whether it is; I know enough to know I don't know. And even those who think they know will generally agree that you don't really know know until it is tested in court. The real problem here is that Oracle is the sort of company that does "test it in court". Is Canonical really big enough to be able to afford this level of risk? Even if they win I would be surprised if they managed to talk the judge into awarding them lawyer costs from Oracle. There's definitely enough ambiguity here that it wouldn't be a stupid suit. Legally, anyhow.
  - chei0aiV 11y ago
derefr 11y ago
One nice thing about things "coming to Ubuntu specifically" is that a lot of people get used to what Linux is "like" through Ubuntu. So when Ubuntu does something, people start looking for that thing whenever they use Linux generally. It generates demand, which pushes changes through.
dsp1234 11y ago
ZFS is not coming to Linux as such, it's coming to Ubuntu specifically This is a faulty understanding of the issue. Other distros such as Debian are packaing 'ZFS on Linux'. Ubuntu is not the first one to offer the ability to have ZFS on Linux in the distros main repository. The difference is actually that the other distros distribute the ZFS code as source, then have the user compile it on their own computer, and then those distros consider that end product as non-redistributable. Whereas Ubunutu is doing the compilation on their own, then distributing the resulting binary work. That's the actual difference.
- ryao 11y ago
  Sabayon Linux has been shipping binary modules for years. No one has ever complained.
adamleventhal 11y ago
It's a fair critique though I didn't write this because I thought I was breaking news. The Canonical announcement was honestly exciting for me, in particular because they evaluated the licensing issues and decided that they were within their rights to provide ZFS to their users. It seemed though that the voices of practitioners was being drowned out by those focusing exclusively on legal matters. I was hoping to provide some information for those unacquainted with both the technology and the legal miasma. Regardless, I'm excited that ZFS is about to have many more users.

jinxedID 11y ago

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:scs1wYblGe0J:dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/03/07/big-news-for-zfs-on-linux/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:scs1wYb...

NoGravitas 11y ago

I suspect "Just ignore the licences and focus on the technology" is not going to fly with enterprise customers.

VonGuard 11y ago
Totally correct. However, it may fly just fine with Ubuntu's "just install a damn Linux and get the app online" crowd. Ubuntu makes Linux easy to install and maintain, and that could be enough for some users. They only need one or two giant apps to grow here in order for it to be called a success.
jra_samba 11y ago
Yep. It's all fun and games until the lawsuits start :-). I don't understand people like this. If they were advocating using pirate copies of Microsoft Windows or other proprietary software, would they be saying "ignore Microsoft legal department and focus on how cool it is that I get a free copy of Windows ? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
- adamleventhal 11y ago
  Lots of people do exactly that. In fact, many companies even use software for which the licenses have lapsed or they never owned licenses in the first place. Sometimes it's by accident; in other cases it's a knowing acceptance of risk.
- kbenson 11y ago
  I don't think that's a relevant comparison at all. What we have here is two open source technologies that have traditionally been kept from being used together because of specific clauses in their licenses, and some lawyers who have looked at it and are vouching that it's not a problem. That's far from ignoring the proprietary closed source, for-profit licensing of a product where it's very clear cut. The lawyers may be wrong, and it's probably a good idea for enterprise customers to steer clear, but the whole point is that there is some valid contention over whether the technologies can be used together. There is not valid contention over whether you can use Windows without a license.

gtirloni 11y ago

What's the situation on btrfs? It was supposed to make ZFS not that big deal anymore on Linux.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
It would if done, but it's not quite there yet.
joshbaptiste 11y ago
Depends on which mailing list you read, the usual consensus I see is it's kinda production ready, though openSUSE has switched to Btrfs as its main file system.
- cyphar 11y ago
  [Disclaimer: I work for SUSE] SUSE Linux Enterprise also uses btrfs by default. There's also a bunch of features like booting into snapshots and snapper (snapshots taken before zypper transactions and on regular intervals with decaying granularity) which are in both OpenSUSE and SLE.
tristanz 11y ago
I can confirm that btrfs has major problems with tons of snapshots. The entire system will hang for minutes on random intervals and go completely unresponsive for hours when using admin commands. The many snapshots use case is pretty common when dealing with containers, even it everything works fine for simple setups.
- cmurf 11y ago
  How many is tons? I've not had such problems with hundreds of snapshots. There are reports on the btrfs list with problems involving many thousands. I have no idea how ZFS snapshots perform when there are hundreds to thousands. The other thing that matters a ton is kernel version, the development is so heavy there are thousands of insertions+deletions per kernel cycle that even in a year it's ordinary to consider those kernels "old" on the list. Most distros by default use old kernels by Btrfs development standards. The exception is Fedora, and openSUSE who do lots of backports explicitly to support Btrfs.

bladerunner82 11y ago

ZFS on Linux. No, thank you. I'll continue to use ZFS natively under FreeBSD, which is arguably a far better OS for what ZFS users would be wanting anyway. Been using *BSD since the late 90s. Never a real issue short of HW failure. I cannot say the same for the painful times I was forced to use Linux. ZFS is indeed a lifesaver, but we in the BSD camps have know this for many moons.

matthewmacleod 11y ago
This is a relatively useless contribution to the discussion. Given that there are obviously reasons why Linux has been successful while BSDs have seen less popular usage, it must be the case that Linux or its ecosystem offers features not found elsewhere. Adding ZFS to Ubuntu is a benefit to everybody, and a smug, holier-than-thou attitude really does nothing to further the conversation about the technology.
- jra_samba 11y ago
  Nope. Adding a legally licensed copy of ZFS to Ubuntu is a benefit to everybody. Oracle haven't seen fit to do that, and they're the only ones who can. Sticking a hack-licensing-job into Ubuntu is damaging to the Linux ecosystem, certainly not a benefit.
  - dsp1234 11y ago
    they're the only ones who can. This is true, in the same way that it's true that the US could vote in a constitutional amendment to allow a dictatorship. First, Oracle only has the copyright to the original ZFS code as it existed in 2010 when they stopped working on OpenSolaris. Second, the AUTHORS[0] file from the 'zfs on linux' project that was imported into ubuntu lists 73 authors not including the Oracle developers, which appear to be both individuals (gmail accounts, etc) and multiple individual businesses (nexenta, ovh, etc). So Oracle cannot naively relicense those 6+ years of contributions, since they have no copyright over that new code. Thus changing the license of the original ZFS code would have no effect because all of the years of contributions since then would still be licensed as CDDL. Third, Oracle does have exactly one 'option'. The details of the CDDL license specifically state that is 'auto upgrades' if a new version comes out, and an older version is not specifically mentioned. So theoretically, they could release a CDDL license version 1.3 that has radically updated text in order to be GPL compatible. However, since that effects all CDDL licensed code, they would end up relicensing every bit of CDDL code (related to Oracle or not) in the entire world. Is that something that Oracle should reasonable be expected to do? I think this is as likely, and as reasonable, as GPL v4 coming out with the text of the MIT license, thus affecting any GPL code in the world that says 'or any later version'. In other words, it's just not reasonable to use this 'one weird trick'. So there is no remotely reasonable way in which Oracle can have an effect on this issue. [0] - http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git/ubuntu/ubuntu-xenial.git/diff/zfs/AUTHORS?id=b65ce14d3445e8fe69b5d59aaaf2699319714179 http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git/ubuntu/ubuntu-xenial.git/diff/z...

skrowl 11y ago

Can I have big news on ZFS (or BTRFS) for Windows now? I've heard how awesome this filesystem is, but I still can't use it.

michaelmrose 11y ago
Seems unlikely that either will ever come to windows guess you should check out ReFS or install Linux https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS#/search https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS#/search
- ryao 11y ago
  The O3X project lead has joked about porting ZFS to Windows after he finished the Mac OS X port. That is the only discussion of porting it to Windows thus far, although there was one guy who tried reimplementing it as a userspace filesystem on Windows, but that did not get far.
ThatPlayer 11y ago
https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs This guy is writing a windows driver for Btrfs

wpietri 11y ago

My favorite quote from the piece: "And it is the height of delusion to think that Oracle would grow ears to hear, a heart to care, and a brain to decide." And this is coming from a former Oracle employee.

asendra 11y ago

Now, how 'bout them Apples err Macs?

srgpqt 11y ago
https://openzfsonosx.org/ https://openzfsonosx.org/

jordigh 11y ago

I know it seem silly to care about licensing in this case, since it's about GPL incompatibility between two free licenses. However, the problem here is the precedent that it sets. If ZFS distributed this way, in binary form linked to Linux, does not infringe Linux's copyleft, then this could open the doors for other kinds of proprietary blobs to grow on top of Linux. That is SFC's analysis, Indeed, Conservancy believes this situation is one battle in a larger proxy war by those who seek to limit the scope of strong copyleft generally. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/ I also fear about what Oracle could do, as they are copyright holders of parts of Linux (btrfs) and might decide to make things difficult for Canonical. Oracle has misused copyleft aggressively in the past, trying to strong-arm people into buying GPL exceptions for MySQL when they didn't need one, although in this case, they probably do have a good case for why a GPL exception would be necessary.

dbcurtis 11y ago
So, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the license incompatibility related to shipping binaries of zfs? If a user chooses to compile locally from zfs sources, then the license issues don't apply, correct? So this is not an issue for, say, Gentoo, Funtoo, LFS, etc, and only an issue for Canonical because they are not interested in a mechanism that allows users to build packages from source, am I correct? I'm thinking something something along the lines of "Here is a tarball containing the sources and a container instance you can spin up. It leaves a .deb behind." What part of this am I missing?
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  On ArchLinux, a user (big shout-out to demizer) maintains a set of ZFS packages on AUR that basically do this (build from Git). On Arch, installing ZFS is a one-liner, e.g. $ yaourt -S zfs-git Here is the source for the build script for the zfs-git package: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=zfs-git https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=zfs-g...
  - 11y ago

sarath749 11y ago

Real useful

sarath749 11y ago

zsf?

DCKing 11y ago

Last I joined in on the discussion I got quite convinced by the argument "if Nvidia can use a propietary license for their Linux graphics driver, then Canonical can use the CDDL for their ZFS driver". Substitute for any other propietary modules that people like to load in their Linux kernels. Can anyone point me out why this argument is wrong? Googling around for this I was actually suprised that propietary kernel modules are in fact a debated topic (obviously to little success of the opponents), but doesn't the practical existence of propietary kernel modules at least show that no-one has had a problem with this for a long time, legally speaking?

mschwaig 11y ago
The problem is not the use per se, the problem is delivering them to the user as one blob of software together. This is not a problem with proprietary graphics drivers, since you can just download them after setting up you system. However, if you want to boot from a ZFS disk, you need the ZFS driver and the only way to obtain it at that point is effectively from the installation medium.
- DCKing 11y ago
  OK, fair enough. So distributions that ship the Nvidia drivers in their distro install image (AFAICT OpenELEC does this, not Canonical though) should be in trouble then? And Canonical would find a way around this by autodownloading the ZFS driver when the user select the "ZFS" option in the installer?
  - mschwaig 11y ago
    IANAL but as far as I can tell there is no legal precedent here and so the questions you raise can only be answered by a lawsuit. Sure there is 'technically' a difference between packaging the ZFS driver with Ubuntu and audodownloading it, but it all depends on how a court sees it, because as long as there is no precedent you can't get off on a technicality like this.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  This isn't quite correct. Nothing really prevents the LiveUSB distribution from writing to itself under ext3, build the ZFS during installation, then use the binary compiled from this process to set it up on the actual SSDs/HDDs. This is legally essentially the same binary blob Nvidia driver as you aren't distributing the binary. I'm assuming the reason this wasn't done was due to the convenience + you'd need to setup the USB like: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD/Persistence https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD/Persistence But once you compiled it on the persistent partition, you'd be able to perform the installation just fine legally and technically is my understanding.

ericfrederich 11y ago

on by default != default filesystem right?

fibo 11y ago

I hope this fixes the "read only filesystem" issue.

shmerl 11y ago

And here I was hoping (somewhat) that big news by now would be Oracle relicensing OpenZSF under GPL :))

nailer 11y ago

> Canonical had their lawyers review the licenses and deemed their use of Linux and OpenZFS to be in compliance. So Canonical, a tiny desktop-focused Linux company, have discovered something that Red Hat's well paid lawyers have missed?

rwmj 11y ago
Red Hat have $billions more to lose.
ryao 11y ago
Do you have a legal statement from Redhat's lawyers? So far, all I heard about their opinions has been hearsay from third parties.
- nailer 11y ago
  The proof is in the pudding: no major company has ever shipped zfs on Linux in the last decade, nor will they in the next decade.

git-pull 11y ago

> Oracle holds a copyright on most of OpenZFS since it was forked from the original ZFS code base. It would be within their rights to decide to relicense ZFS under the GPL. Why imply it should convert to GPL? It could become GPL compatible by making the license more permissive. https://blogs.oracle.com/chandan/entry/copyrights_licenses_and_cddl_illustrated https://blogs.oracle.com/chandan/entry/copyrights_licenses_a... "A common misconception is about CDDL and GPL incompatibility. (Incompatibility in the sense: to combine two source files, one under GPL and another under CDDL, to create a common executable.) GPL is incompatible with most licenses like Mozilla Public License, Apache, and CDDL. GPL wants you erase those licenses and use GPL in that place, where as these licenses do not permit erasing them. Hence the incompatibility deadlock."

gcb0 11y ago
irrelevant politics, but if you aim to be included in the kernel at some point, you must go for GPL or live with "kernel tainted" messages. which i think is great.
- mioelnir 11y ago
  Which is the core of the argument. ZFS is simply not aimed at being included in the kernel at some point. Linux user's just wish it were so.

SirMaster 11y ago

What about Proxmox? They are a commercial slightly modified Debian distro who have been shipping ZFS with their ISOs and ready to use out of the box, even from the installer wizard for zfs on root installs for around a year now. Nobody has said anything about them doing this or sued them or tried to stop them. They are distributing the ZFS on linux binary kernel module pre-instated as Canonical is about to do with Ubuntu.

jethro_tell 11y ago
Who? Edit: Oracle seems to have very little reason to do anything for precedent. Canonical is both competition and a largish business, that would be done for the money, suing proxmox would look like being a bully.

mankash666 11y ago

Why ZFS on Linux when FreeBSD ships with ZFS by default, without any legal quagmires? Also, we need a real open-source, non-GPL competitor to Linux if there's any hope of not being taken hostage by overzealous GPL enforcement by SFC and other GPL right-wingers.

carapace 11y ago

"Ignore pedants who would deride your pragmatic use of technology as heretical or immoral." That sounds like bad advice.

newman314 11y ago

"Lawyerly cosplay" ROFLMAO

Zardoz84 11y ago

And there is an appreciable performance difference between using ZFS and BtrFS ?

DominoTree 11y ago
Massive under certain use cases, and major reliability and feature differences too. A lot of BtrFS is still "in progress" like the copy-on-write stuff and fault detection.
- Zardoz84 11y ago
  Actually I'm using BtrFS on a few Ubuntu server 14.04 virtual machines. It's very nice when I need to add extra hard disk space, and I only need to add or expand de the virtual hard disk, and indicate to the filesystem to append the extra new space. Also, transparent compression comes very useful, on special when our applications are very dependent on I/O performance and need to store a lot of write single time/read a lot of times data.