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> 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

> 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 ago
ZFS on Linux has official support for Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentu, OpenSUSE, RHEL &CentOS and Ubuntu.
- cyphar 9y ago
  It 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 ago
    Well, also NixOS.
- jononor 9y ago
  Supported by whom? Is it at the level one can expect from paid support from say Red Hat, SUSE or Canonical?
  - cyphar 9y ago
    They'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 ago
I'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 ago
Well, 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.

zacmps 9y ago

ZFS on Linux has official support for Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentu, OpenSUSE, RHEL &CentOS and Ubuntu.

cyphar 9y ago
It 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 ago
  Well, also NixOS.
jononor 9y ago
Supported by whom? Is it at the level one can expect from paid support from say Red Hat, SUSE or Canonical?
- cyphar 9y ago
  They'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 ago

I'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 ago

Well, 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.