8 ms·
ZFS on Linux 0.7.13
- unmole 8y agoFrom the release notes, it seems like a normal point release. I'm not seeing anything particularly noteworthy but this has hit the front page for some reason. What am I missing?
- dchest 8y agoPrevious title had "...with Linux 5.0 compatibility". The significance of this is that 5.0 changed some interfaces used by ZFS to require GPL license, which ZoL can't call, which generated some discussion https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190115134221.GB30742@kroah.com/#t https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190115134221.GB30742@kroah.co...
- josteink 8y agoWouldn’t it be possible to create an intermediate GPL licensed kernel-module which simply re-exported the relevant exports so that other kernel-modules could use the exports provided by this module instead? It could have a neat name too, like “gplbridge” or whatever (all associations with License-trolls only partially intended). That way they wouldn’t have remove optimized code for Linux 5+ users. Dirty, utterly pointless, but it would get the job done, right?
- belorn 8y agoImagine standing in court explaining to a non-technical judge and jury how this "bridge" transforms the copyrighted work into two fully separated works rather than a single derivative work. Do think it would work? Personally I think one has a better time arguing that kernel modules simply interface with the kernel rather than creating a derivative work, thus making any module independent from the license of the kernel. The case law around "interfacing" is conflicting, but at least a few cases has gone in favor of the accused.
- kawsper 8y agoThe original title mentioned that ZFS now have support for Linux Kernel version 5, which is something that have been discussed before since the kernel maintainers don't like the hooks that zfsonlinux uses, it was discussed on HN but I can't find it, the discussion sprung up because of this message: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190110182413.GA6932@kroah.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190110182413.GA6932@kroah.com...
- cesarb 8y agoThe previous discussion was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19018185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19018185
- cesarb 8y agoThere was a recent controversy in which the Linux kernel removed some functions which were being used by the ZFS module, but their replacement are "GPL-only" functions which cannot be used by the ZFS module. This release has a workaround for that, so it can be compiled for Linux 5.0. (IIRC, the original title of this submission had " with Linux 5.0 support" at the end, indicating why this release is newsworthy, but I'm not seeing it anymore.)
- eddyg 8y agoMore context: https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=154722999728768&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=154722999728768&w=2 > 5.0 removes the ability from non-GPL modules to use the FPU or SIMD instructions
- josteink 8y agoThat’s a pretty good reason to stay on 4.x IMO. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Optionally, we may expect distros like Ubuntu simply reverse that change to not ruin their own packages. Also... > My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant. Greg seems like a really pragmatic, nice and agreeable chap. Bet he’s a big hit at parties.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Conan_Kudo 8y ago> Optionally, we may expect distros like Ubuntu simply reverse that change to not ruin their own packages. If they want to earn the ire of the Linux kernel developers, sure. But they won't do that, especially if they employ kernel developers. That's a scummy thing to do.
- Dylan16807 8y agoIt is complete bull to claim that loading and saving the FPU state makes a piece of code inherently derivative of GPL code such that it must itself be GPL. Calling that bluff may draw ire but it is not scummy.
- PedroBatista 8y agoThat's how I like my file systems updates, anything not particularly noteworthy.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- freddie_mercury 8y ago9 years old, with 70 releases, and still not good enough for a 1.0 release, huh? Guess I'll wait until they think it is ready for production.....
- lelf 8y agoFreeBSD and SmartOS have rock-solid ZFS.
- laumars 8y agoFirstly this is ZoL, not ZFS. And secondly version numbers are often a meaningless gauge of when something is production ready. In any production environment you'd need to thoroughly test any new technology (or even point releases of existing tech) before deploying to prod because regression bugs and undocumented behaviour is a real thing. As an aside, I've been running ZFS since shortly after it's release and have ran it across 4 distinct operating systems in that time. It's honestly been one of the best pieces of engineering I've used in that time. To the extent that ZFS has saved me from total data loss (ignoring, for the moment, backups) on at least two separate occasions.
- freddie_mercury 8y ago9 years and 70 releases is referring to ZoL. I use ZFS. I am mocking open source developers' terror of calling something a 1.0 release. At the same time they say release numbers aren't an indication of quality their actions tell us that release numbers matter a lot and that's why they are scared of calling something a 1.0 release.
- laumars 8y ago> 9 years and 70 releases is referring to ZoL. Wow time flies! Feels like only yesterday I was reading about the inception of that project.
- jordanbeiber 8y agoThe idea I guess is that many project historically use the power of the decimals to indicate major from minor versions. That’s it. This ”scared” and ”terror” talk is a bit unnecessary as the only one interested in numbers in a version no. is someone selling it. Linus is mocking this very fact by arbitrarily raising the kernel version.
- zmix 8y agoWrong title! Should be "ZFS on Linux (or ZoL) 0.7.13 Released". The "real" ZFS is still under Oracle's hand and the spinoff is OpenZFS.
- b1r6 8y agoDefinitely agree. It's easy for people to mix them up but we need to be clear. I absolutely loooove ZoL and run it on all cluster nodes. Proxmox works beautifully with it. I really hope ZFS for Linux and the kernel can get along, because ZoL greatly enriches Linux usability in storage needs.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoBut OpenZFS is the one that matters now, so usually when people say ZFS, they actually mean OpenZFS.
- vectorEQ 8y agobesides the fact it looks now it's zfs, on linux 0.7.13 xD which would be silly at best
- meruru 8y agoI wonder if all the work to make ZFS compatible with Linux will help make it more portable to other platforms as well. I really want to be able to use it on OpenBSD, but the prospects were very low last time I checked.
- laumars 8y agoThe recent(ish) comment from FreeBSD seemed to suggest it doesn't. If I recall correctly they are switching to ZoL because it receives more frequent bug fixes but they expect to have just as much work porting each update to FreeBSD as they currently do with the Illumos builds.
- sureaboutthis 8y agoFreeBSD isn't "switching" to ZoL but it's a consolidation of effort as the FreeBSD related personnel come on board to ZoL.
- laumars 8y agoRight...I get I was condensing the facts somewhat for the sake of brevity but your expanded point isn't contradicting what I said. The end result is FreeBSD are migrating over to the ZoL code base. I'm guessing from the way you're spinning things that you're not ok with this switch? Personally I don't care where FreeBSD pull their ZFS sources from as long as it's stable - and I have full confidence in them that it will be.
- gtirloni 8y agoAt this point, what's Oracle getting from not making ZFS GPL? They have their own RHEL derivative, would it make life easier for them as well (having an external community committed to keeping ZFS in the kernel tree)?
- pickle-wizard 8y agoIn my opinion, it is because they are freaking Orcale, they don't do anything for free. Heck they recently started charging for the Java runtime. Some that has been free for over 20 years. I really hate to say this, but I wish IBM had bought Sun instead of Oracle. Even better I really wish Sun had managed to pivot and stay an independent company.
- pron 8y ago> Heck they recently started charging for the Java runtime. On the contrary, they've open sourced the entire JDK for the first time ever, and are now offering the same JDK either completely free or with paid support, rather than the mixed free/commercial JDK as before. (I work at Oracle on OpenJDK, but speak only for myself)
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoThough I still run into software which doesn't like OpenJDK, complaining that the jar file was compiled with a newer version (and I have the latest OpenJDK version) which I assume means it wants the Oracle Java SE application.
- pron 8y agoIt depends on which version you're using. As of JDK 11, OpenJDK and Oracle Java SE are the same.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoI'm on OpenJDK 11.0, but I still get a "...compiled by a more recent version of the Java Runtime (class file version 53.0), this version of the Java Runtime only recognizes class file versions up to 52.0..." error.
- jamesblonde 8y agoI am still waiting for the 0.8 release with the killer feature of encryption-at-rest. They take their time, but what they do is so important, it has to be right.
- koolba 8y agoWhy is that special and what can you do with it that you can’t do now with LUKS on the underlying partitions?
- lohszvu 8y agoPerformance
- fs2 8y agoTheoretical performance because on a system with an SSD you don't notice any difference at all with or without LUKS encryption.
- nextgens 8y agoMany things... here are the ones I care about: - you can have different keys for all your "partitions" without having to pre-allocate them - you can send encrypted incremental snapshots to a host that doesn't have the key (for backups for instance) - it's using authenticated encryption (as opposed to LUKS with XTS)
- frutiger 8y ago> you can send encrypted incremental snapshots to a host that doesn't have the key (for backups for instance) Isn't this possible already by encrypting the incremental snapshots with a key of your choice, and then just storing that on the remote host?
- nextgens 8y agoSure, but you can't "consolidate" them without re-transferring everything (typically differential snapshots)... whereas with native encryption, you just delete the snapshot.
- flyinghamster 8y agoI'm still awaiting official TRIM support for SSDs. Last I checked, that was still a work in progress but coming close to release. Also along that line, there's also work going on to make L2ARC persistent across reboots (which would be wonderful for starting up VMs hosted on zvols).
- nielsole 8y agoI heard that recent SSD s don't really rely on trim so it doesn't really matter, does it?
- nabla9 8y agoYou don't need it but you want it. SSD's don't rely on trim, so you don't need them. It has still impact on performance and longlivety of the SSD. Depending on the usage patterns, the effect can be large or nonexistent.
- Dylan16807 8y agoZFS needs double digits of free space to be happy. SSDs need double digits of zeroed space to be happy. Overlapping these requires TRIM.
- pokemongoaway 8y agoInteresting. Any idea of Type-1 hypervisor can run on ZFS (PCIe) SSDs somehow? Happy to wait for trim support if that's the requirement.
- temptemptemp111 8y agoHey, I'm curious, would you mind turning 'showdead' on and replying to my comment here? I'm shadowbanned on here and would sometimes actually like replies in discussion with interesting comments like yours. Thanks.
- fxfan 8y agoWhich of zfs and btrfs is better on Linux? And which of the two works better with Windows (both have github drivers)? I'm looking to use on a personal computer on a partition shared between Linux and Windows
- rocqua 8y agoFrom my research: ZFS is more stable, has the downside of not allowing expansion of volumes, and has the issue of not being upstreamed. BTRfs has the option to expand volumes, is native to Linux, but has a wiff of unstability. Most notably with the persisting raid 5 write hole. I haven't found a good choice yet. Though I think I'd go btrfs at the moment.
- tomatocracy 8y agoZfs does allow pools to be expanded by adding vdevs. What it doesn’t allow is for raid sets to be expanded by replacing with larger disks one at a time. This can however be done with mirrored sets. Add new larger discs to the mirror set, wait for resilvering, remove older smaller discs, done. 0.8 will also bring the ability to remove vdevs so effectively shrink a pool through a similar (but slightly different) process.
- mbreese 8y agoBut even though you can add vdevs, it doesn’t rebalance the mirror. This means your entire pool, albeit larger, is still slower. (Unless this is a change that will be brought about in 0.8, I haven’t followed that closely).
- radiowave 8y agoNot quite right - you absolutely can expand raidz vdevs by replacing the disks one at a time. What you can't do is increase the "width" of the raidz, or seamlessly rebalance data between multiple vdevs.
- josteink 8y ago> ZFS is more stable, has the downside of not allowing expansion of volumes No longer true. I’ve expanded volumes on Ubuntu with ZoL.
- jmcqk6 8y agoDoes anyone know of a good practical guide for basic administration of ZFS on linux?
- oneguysomewhere 8y agohttps://pthree.org/2012/12/14/zfs-administration-part-ix-copy-on-write/ https://pthree.org/2012/12/14/zfs-administration-part-ix-cop... Here is a good one I've used.
- gigatexal 8y agoAnyone benchmark the affect the 5.0 kernel vector disabled stuff has?
- cracauer 8y agoI still have a bad bug with those versions. Anyone else? https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/8396 https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/8396 Basically, when serving NFS from a Linux-ZFS the client can read/write/seek fine, but on-demand paging sometimes fails (the same way it is supposed to fail when the file has been deleted server-side, but without any activity on the server). So for example if you /usr is NFS emacs startup results in a bus error. The error rate increases with server uptime. I tested ext2fs with the same linux kernel on the server and same clients - problem goes away. I use about the same ZFS version serving the same files from FreeBSD-current, error goes away. I cannot be the only one seeing this?