6 ms·
Serious question: Why would anyone today use BTRFS, given that the battle-proof ZFS has finnally been ported to Linux for quite some time?
by vog 9y ago
Serious question: Why would anyone today use BTRFS, given that the battle-proof ZFS has finnally been ported to Linux for quite some time?
- josteink 9y ago> Why would anyone today use BTRFS, given that the battle-proof ZFS has finnally been ported to Linux for quite some time? It's only been available out of the box in a simple-to-use and supported fashion in 1 Distro for barely 1 year. You can hardly say it's been widely available, nor for a "quite some time".
- zacmps 9y agoZFS on Linux has official support for Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentu, OpenSUSE, RHEL &CentOS and Ubuntu.
- cyphar 9y agoIt has "official support" from the ZoL folks. And yes, openSUSE has ZFS packages in OBS. But we sure as hell don't ship them by default, or in our official repos. The same applies for Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, RHEL and CentOS. Ubuntu is the only distribution that official supports ZoL, and actually ships it in it's official repositories (and by default). What that means is that Canonical is effectively saying "we trust there's no legal reason why we cannot do this." No other distribution has made that claim. EDIT: Actually NixOS also supports it, but the point stands.
- Filligree 9y agoWell, also NixOS.
- jononor 9y agoSupported by whom? Is it at the level one can expect from paid support from say Red Hat, SUSE or Canonical?
- cyphar 9y agoThey're referring to ZoL providing support for distributions (which actually just means "it works, and if you send a bug we'll work on it"). Only Canonical provides support from the distribution side. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15088761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15088761.
- linsomniac 9y agoI've been using ZFS on Linux for 5+ years. I know a lot of people wrote off zfs+fuse, but I used it very successfully to store 10s of TB of backup data for years with no data loss events and performance I can't tell was worse than ZFSonLinux. And I've been using ZoL for years at another job. I think your "barely a year" metric is far off.
- tw04 9y agoWell, two things. He didn't say that, he said it's been PORTED to Linux for quite some time. Which is accurate, the first "stable" release was in 2013 - 4 years qualifies as "quite some time" in pretty much any tech circle that isn't VMS. As for it not being widely available... you're saying the only way for something to be considered widely available is to be included in the distro directly? I'd argue an easy installation/setup and solid documentation are FAR more important than being included in a distro. If the setup is arcane or the documentation is horrible, it doesn't matter if a tool is in every distro on the planet, nobody is going to use it.
- mulle_nat 9y agoBecause I want my machine to do something else besides running a filesystem. :P
- intsunny 9y agoSome of us are very concerned about licensing at all times. I'd wager such steadfast concern is ultimately what helped Linux in matters of SCO v. IBM over the matters of IBM's JFS file system. ZFS is very much in a grey area, and in turn, a huge turn off for many.
- josteink 9y ago> ZFS is very much in a grey area Really? How so? And if so, what about all those proprietary GPU-driver kernel-modules from AMD and Nvidia which definitely are not compatible with the GPL? Are they a gray area too? And if they're not a gray area... Why is it suddenly a problem that the ZFS kernel-module is not licensed in a GPL-compatible manner? I'm not trying to sound facetious, but I honestly can't see the distinction here. And Linux distros left and right have been distributing closed-source kernel-modules for GPUs for a long time now. So what's the problem? What am I missing?
- riffraff 9y agoClosed GPU drivers are made by the companies, which have interest in graphic cards being sold, and not sueing linux users. ZFS on the other hand is owned by Oracle which has no interest in people using linux, nor ZFS if it's not on their proprietary stuff.
- pgeorgi 9y agoAt that point, why rely on Linux?
- vog 9y agoNot sure why others downvoted you. (Maybe because you didn't name the alternative you obviously had in mind.) But I think you have a fair point: If it is about quality and stability, why not going from Linux+ZFS straight to FreeBSD+ZFS?
- pantalaimon 9y agoThe possibility to dynamically add and remove discs from the array is a pretty neat feature.
- rocqua 9y agoFor my personal NAS use, this is the lacking feature that makes me stick with ext4 over ZFS. I'd go to btrfs if not for the reputation of unstability.
- moogly 9y agoIt's the default fs on Synology NAS:es.
- X86BSD 9y agoDidn't they move to FreeBSD?
- moogly 9y agoSynology DSM is based on their own custom Linux. Nothing's changed there recently, except that with 6.x released last year, btrfs became the default file system (used to be ext4).
- X86BSD 9y agoMy mistake then. One of the small NAS vendors moved to FreeBSD. I for the life of me can't think of the name of the vendor.
- mdnormy 9y agoDon't think so. I maintained multi-vendor NAS'es and always try to be up-to-date. Do you mean QNAP? Last year they started offering new enterprise NAS with custom OS built on top of BSD kernel > QNAP Enterprise Storage(QES) operating system, which is based on the simple and efficient FreeBSD kernel and the ZFS file system https://www.qnap.com/en/product/model.php?II=246 https://www.qnap.com/en/product/model.php?II=246
- stargrazer 9y agohttps://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/ https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/ ? but I think they've been using it for quite some time.
- user5994461 9y ago>>> given that the battle-proof ZFS has finnally been ported to Linux for quite some time? ZFS has not been ported to Linux yet. At best, one could say that there are SOME pieces of it being ported and tested on -exclusively- the latest Ubuntu.
- JdeBP 9y agoHacker News recently had a discussion of this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15011181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15011181 .
- xioxox 9y agoBTRFS has much more flexible snapshots and clones than ZFS. You can create rewritable snapshots and create new snapshots based on those. In addition you can create COW copies of files with "cp --reflink" which ZFS doesn't support. BTRFS feels much more like a native filesystem on Linux too. It doesn't have that big ARC cache. We've been using BTRFS for 5+ yrs on a Linux MD RAID setup, with no problems at all.
- unlmtd1 9y agoOn the flip side, ZFS on linux now has native encryption.
- throw0824a 9y ago> You can create rewritable snapshots and create new snapshots based on those. You can do this with ZFS as well. First, there is no such thing as a "rewritable snapshot"; the term is an oxymoron. Please do not use it and please do not promulgate it. The term "snapshot" should be reserved for read-only states of a (file) system at a particular point of time: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot_(computer_storage) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot_(computer_storage) Second, ZFS does have this feature: its called cloning. You create a (read-only) snapshot, and then run the "clone" command to make it read-write: * https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/zfs-zfs.html#zfs-zfs-clones https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/zfs-zfs.html#zfs-zfs-cl... * http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gbcxz/index.html#6n7ht6r4p http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gbcxz/index.htm... As long as the clone exists though, the snapshot cannot be deleted. However you can "promote" the clone, after which the snapshot can be removed. This feature has been around since at least 2010: * https://www.freebsddiary.org/zfs-promote.php https://www.freebsddiary.org/zfs-promote.php Please use the word "clone" for a read-write copy of an original data set, as it is already fairly accepted nomenclature: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_cloning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_cloning * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloning_(programming) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloning_(programming)
- xioxox 9y agoI was aware of the promotion feature. I was creating new clones/snapshots in a chain hierarchy in zfs, copying old backup sets progressively onto the back of the chain, but keeping the head as the current copy. This was a breeze in btrfs, but basically impossible in zfs as it refused to promote the old clones/snapshots. As to the nomenclature, it doesn't seem to make sense to differentiate snapshots and clones. With the flexibility of btrfs they're just the same thing with a R/O flag.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- linsomniac 9y agoI love ZFS, but I'll also say that I also feel like ZFS is fairly slow. Of course, it probably doesn't help that most of my ZFS machines hold 10+TB of data, with lots of snapshots. I don't feel like I'm going to be using btrfs anytime soon, I've given up on it. But there are days I wish I had an alternative for high reliability, snapshotting, and ideally deduplication (which usually tends to make my ZFS machines fall over). I'd love to see HAMMER on Linux.