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"Definite legal ambiguity remains with ZFS" This seems to be the biggest problem with ZFS. Even Apple ditched ZFS on macOS. ZFS is slowing down and impacting

"Definite legal ambiguity remains with ZFS" This seems to be the biggest problem with ZFS. Even Apple ditched ZFS on macOS. ZFS is slowing down and impacting the real alternative: btrfs. IMHO Red Hat should be ashamed for abandoning btrfs. ‍️

mbreese 9y ago
I'm not sure I blame Red Hat all too much in this. Both ZFS and btrfs are owned/driven by Oracle. When Oracle bought Sun (and ZFS), it seemed like the pace of btrfs slowed significantly. I'm not sure what Oracle really wants to do in this situation, but they are clearly in the driver's seat. (This is also alluded to in the article)
- chungy 9y ago
  It definitely did. btrfs might have been ready years ago otherwise, but instead... it languishes like a sad joke in comparison to ZFS. The biggest problem btrfs has, really, is the user interface. Nothing is as easy to use as the zfs command! This is still a pretty good summary of the differences: https://rudd-o.com/linux-and-free-software/ways-in-which-zfs-is-better-than-btrfs https://rudd-o.com/linux-and-free-software/ways-in-which-zfs... The only part that's outdated now is that btrfs finally has raid5/6 support... kind of. It's still marked experimental and shouldn't be trusted for production data. Mind, btrfs does have one advantage: online shrink support providing much better resizing capabilities for its pools. This has always been on the backburner of ZFS; Sun once had a very slow implementation back around 2005-2006, but the Oracle acquisition pretty much killed any planned work on that front and I think most users of ZFS likewise don't consider it a high priority either. Even for the case of btrfs... it only works great when it's in the mood to. It's a bit easy to get into situations where it will absolutely refuse to remove devices despite there being plenty of space for it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- 2trill2spill 9y ago
  > Both ZFS and btrfs are owned/driven by Oracle. While ZFS is owned by Oracle they certainly don't drive development. Oracle has their closed source version of ZFS used in the now dead Solaris. Then their is OpenZFS which is where the majority of research and development takes place and where Illumos, FreeBSD, MacOS and Linux developers upstream their work.
  - ansible 9y ago
    And, from one of the linked articles, SuSE is the biggest contributor to btrfs. We've been running btrfs in production for our small shop for a couple years. We've had one incident, but not too many problems, really. Though, next time, I might not be using btrfs RAID-1, and instead use the regular MD. I'd still want the on-disk checksums for data, and the snapshots, which are awesome.
    - mbreese 9y ago
      But when Oracle bought Sun, I'm fairly certain Oracle was the driver. (Didn't they employ the initial developer?) SuSE just doesn't have the same level of resources that Oracle can bring to bear. At the time, btrfs was a crucial feature for the next version of Linux because of ZFS. When Oracle bought Sun, that competitive pressure was gone.
  - mbreese 9y ago
    I'm not saying Oracle is driving development (of either btrfs or ZFS). That's the problem! Both projects feel very stagnant. You can't argue that OpenZFS has close to the amount of resources to put into ZFS that Sun did (pre-Oracle). While I run ZFS (FreeBSD and ZoL) and prefer it over pretty much anything.... ZFS is not nearly as popular as it might have been if it was released with a GPL-compatible license. At the time, this was intentional by Sun, who knew Linux was a competitor to Solaris, so I can't say that I blame them...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

mbreese 9y ago

I'm not sure I blame Red Hat all too much in this. Both ZFS and btrfs are owned/driven by Oracle. When Oracle bought Sun (and ZFS), it seemed like the pace of btrfs slowed significantly. I'm not sure what Oracle really wants to do in this situation, but they are clearly in the driver's seat. (This is also alluded to in the article)

chungy 9y ago
It definitely did. btrfs might have been ready years ago otherwise, but instead... it languishes like a sad joke in comparison to ZFS. The biggest problem btrfs has, really, is the user interface. Nothing is as easy to use as the zfs command! This is still a pretty good summary of the differences: https://rudd-o.com/linux-and-free-software/ways-in-which-zfs-is-better-than-btrfs https://rudd-o.com/linux-and-free-software/ways-in-which-zfs... The only part that's outdated now is that btrfs finally has raid5/6 support... kind of. It's still marked experimental and shouldn't be trusted for production data. Mind, btrfs does have one advantage: online shrink support providing much better resizing capabilities for its pools. This has always been on the backburner of ZFS; Sun once had a very slow implementation back around 2005-2006, but the Oracle acquisition pretty much killed any planned work on that front and I think most users of ZFS likewise don't consider it a high priority either. Even for the case of btrfs... it only works great when it's in the mood to. It's a bit easy to get into situations where it will absolutely refuse to remove devices despite there being plenty of space for it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
2trill2spill 9y ago
> Both ZFS and btrfs are owned/driven by Oracle. While ZFS is owned by Oracle they certainly don't drive development. Oracle has their closed source version of ZFS used in the now dead Solaris. Then their is OpenZFS which is where the majority of research and development takes place and where Illumos, FreeBSD, MacOS and Linux developers upstream their work.
- ansible 9y ago
  And, from one of the linked articles, SuSE is the biggest contributor to btrfs. We've been running btrfs in production for our small shop for a couple years. We've had one incident, but not too many problems, really. Though, next time, I might not be using btrfs RAID-1, and instead use the regular MD. I'd still want the on-disk checksums for data, and the snapshots, which are awesome.
  - mbreese 9y ago
    But when Oracle bought Sun, I'm fairly certain Oracle was the driver. (Didn't they employ the initial developer?) SuSE just doesn't have the same level of resources that Oracle can bring to bear. At the time, btrfs was a crucial feature for the next version of Linux because of ZFS. When Oracle bought Sun, that competitive pressure was gone.
- mbreese 9y ago
  I'm not saying Oracle is driving development (of either btrfs or ZFS). That's the problem! Both projects feel very stagnant. You can't argue that OpenZFS has close to the amount of resources to put into ZFS that Sun did (pre-Oracle). While I run ZFS (FreeBSD and ZoL) and prefer it over pretty much anything.... ZFS is not nearly as popular as it might have been if it was released with a GPL-compatible license. At the time, this was intentional by Sun, who knew Linux was a competitor to Solaris, so I can't say that I blame them...
deleted 9y ago
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