26 ms·

Here's his reasoning: "honestly, there is no way I can merge any of the ZFS efforts until I get an official letter from Oracle that is signed by their main leg

by Jonnax 7y ago

Here's his reasoning: "honestly, there is no way I can merge any of the ZFS efforts until I get an official letter from Oracle that is signed by their main legal counsel or preferably by Larry Ellison himself that says that yes, it's ok to do so and treat the end result as GPL'd. Other people think it can be ok to merge ZFS code into the kernel and that the module interface makes it ok, and that's their decision. But considering Oracle's litigious nature, and the questions over licensing, there's no way I can feel safe in ever doing so. And I'm not at all interested in some "ZFS shim layer" thing either that some people seem to think would isolate the two projects. That adds no value to our side, and given Oracle's interface copyright suits (see Java), I don't think it's any real licensing win either."

Hamuko 7y ago
That's his reasoning for not merging ZFS code, not for generally avoiding ZFS.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  Well he had this: > as far as I can tell, it has no real maintenance behind it either any more Which simply isn't true. They just released a new ZFS version with encryption built in (no more ZFS + LUKS) and they removed the SPL dependency (which didn't support Linux 5.0+ anyway). I use ZFS on my Linux machines for my storage and I've been rather happy with it.
  - Covzire 7y ago
    Same, for at least 6 years in a 4 drive zraid array. It always reads and writes at full gigabit ethernet speeds and I haven't had any downtime other than maintaining FreeBSD updates which are trivial even when going from 10.x to 11 to 12.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      Same here (4-drive raidz for many years), though I do have an issue where deleting large files (~1 GB) takes around a minute and nobody seems to know why (I have plenty free space and RAM)...
      - dekhn 7y ago
        do you have lots of snapshots? every snapshotting FS I've worked with has really slow deletes, especially when the volume is near capacity.
        StavrosK 7y ago
        I have 400 in total, though none on the slow volume :/ That shouldn't affect it, right?
        rleigh 7y ago
        Snapshots are one thing ZFS is fast at. All the blocks for a given snapshot are placed on a "deadlist". Snapshot deletion is essentially just returning this list of blocks back to the free pool. A terabyte snapshot will take a short while (in the background) to recycle those blocks. But the deletion itself is near instantaneous.
        dekhn 7y ago
        I think you misunderstand: file deletions are what is slow (I don't use ZFS, my reference is WAFL, but my understanding is that all snapshotting file systems have this problem).
        rleigh 7y ago
        Even this should have minimal overhead. If the file is present in the snapshot, then it's simply moving the blocks over to the deadlist which is a very cheap operation. If it's not in the snapshot then the blocks will get recycled in the background. In both cases you should have the unlink complete almost immediately. All of the snapshot functionality is based upon simple transaction number comparisons plus the deadlist of blocks owned by the snapshot. Only the recycling of blocks should have a bit of overhead, and that's done by a background worker--you see the free space increase for a few minutes after a gargantuan snapshot or dataset deletion, but the actual deletion completed immediately.
    - glenneroo 7y ago
      "Same" for the last ~4 years, starting with 8 disks and as of 2018, the 24-bay enclosure is full. Each vdev is a mirrored pair split across HBAs to sedate my paranoia. I've replaced a few drives after watching unreadable sector count slowly increase over a few months. I've also switched out most of the original 3TB pairs to 8TB and 10TB pairs. ~42TB usable and the box only has 16GB of RAM (because I can't get the used 32GB sticks to work, it's a picky mainboard and difficult to find matching ECC memory here in Europe). I haven't powered down much except to attempt to replace the RAM or during extremely hot days. Read/write speed is more or less max gigabit, even during rebuild after hot-swapping drives.
    - vetinari 7y ago
      A single 5400 rpm drive (the like of wd red) should be able to saturate gigabit ethernet. 4 drive array should be basically idling.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Covzire 7y ago
  Relevant bits: "Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me. The benchmarks I've seen do not make ZFS look all that great. And as far as I can tell, it has no real maintenance behind it either any more, so from a long-term stability standpoint, why would you ever want to use it in the first place?"
  - rleigh 7y ago
    Not sure where that belief comes from. But it might be that many benchmarks are naive and compare it against other filesystems in single-disc setups with zero tuning. Since its metadata overheads are higher, it's definitely slower in this scenario. However, put a pool onto an array of discs and tune it a little, and the performance scales up and up leaving all Linux-native filesystems, and LVM/dm/mdraid, well behind. It's a shame that Linux has nothing compelling to do better than this.
    - Jonnax 7y ago
      Have you seen any benchmarks for the scenario you've described?
    - voltagex_ 7y ago
      Have you got any info on how to do the required tuning that's geared towards a home NAS?
      - HorstG 7y ago
        Group your disks in bunches of 4 or 5 per Raidz, no more. And have them on the same controller or SAS-expander per bunch. Use striping over the bunches. Don't use hotspares, for performance maybe avoid RAIDz6. Try out and benchmark a lot. Get more RAM, lots more RAM.
        timc3 7y ago
        Back when I setup my last ZFS running on OmniOS 5 disks was not optimal, though i am running RAIDZ2 But yes, lots of RAM
- bscphil 7y ago
  Well, he says > It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me. So presumably the licensing problem mentioned by your parent's comment is weighing heavily here. I think this "don't use ZFS" statement is most accurately targeted at distro maintainers. Anyone not actually redistributing Linux and ZFS in a way that would (maybe) violate the GPL is not at any risk. That means even large enterprises can get away with using ZoL.
- m463 7y ago
  "Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me." When he says that, I think on the $500 million Sun spent on advertising java.
  - anon73044 7y ago
    Sun isn't going to sue anyone into oblivion any time soon, but Oracle sure will
    - m463 7y ago
      I was thinking more of "the buzzword" bit, and how it got to be such a well known technology.
    - TheFiend7 7y ago
      That's kinda non-sensical IMO. If Oracle, the parent company is trigger happy, there are no guarantees they won't go deeper to protect their children companies IP if they feel they're being infringed.
    - ailideex 7y ago
      Sun is all but defunct, I don't think I would characterize it as a subsidiary of Oracle.
- btilly 7y ago
  Here are his reasons for generally avoiding ZFS from what I consider most important to least. - The kernel team may break it at any time, and won't care if they do. - It doesn't seem to be well-maintained. - Performance is not that great compared to the alternatives. - Using it opens you up to the threat of lawsuits from Oracle. Given history, this is a real threat. (This is one that should be high for Linus but not for me - there is no conceivable reason that Oracle would want to threaten me with a lawsuit.)
  - organsnyder 7y ago
    A former employer was threatened by Oracle because some downloads for the (only free for noncommercial use) VirtualBox Extension Pack came from an IP block owned by the organization. Home users are probably safe, but Oracle's harassment engine has incredible reach.
    - thu2111 7y ago
      Well ... that sounds initially unreasonable, but then if I think about it a bit more I'm not sure how you'd actually enforce a non-commercial use only license without some basic heuristic like "companies are commercial". Is the expectation here that firms offering software under non-commercial-use-is-free licenses just run it entirely on the honour system? And isn't it true that many firms use unlicensed software, hence the need for audits?
      - hackmiester 7y ago
        They harass universities about it too. Which is ludicrous, because universities often have residence halls, and people who live there often download VirtualBox extensions.
        malty7301 7y ago
        Their PUEL license even has a grant specifically for educational use.
- ghaff 7y ago
  And he was doing fine up to that point. For IMO good reasons, ZFS will likely never be merged into Linux. And filesystem kernel modules from third parties have a pretty long history of breakage issues going back to some older Unixes. That's going to be plenty of reason not to use ZFS for most people. The licensing by itself is also certainly a showstopper for many. But I'm not sure his other comments are really fair and, had Oracle relicensed ZFS n years back, ZFS would almost certainly be shipping with Linux, whether or not as the typical default I can't say. It certainly wasn't just a buzzword and there were a number of interesting aspects to its approach.
- lmilcin 7y ago
  The problem with ZFS is that it isn't part of Linux kernel. Linux project maintains compatibility with userspace software but it does not maintain compatibility with 3rd party modules and for a good reason. Since modules have access to any internal kernel API it is not possible to change anything within kernel without considering 3rd party code, if you want to keep that code working. For this reason the decision was made that if you want your module to work you need to make it part of Linux kernel and then if anybody refactors anything they need to consider modules they would be affecting by the change. Not allowing the module to be part of the kernel is a disservice to your user base. While there are modules like that that are maintained moderately successfully (Nvidia, vmware, etc.) this is all at the cost of the user and userspace maintainers who have to deal with it.
  - unethical_ban 7y ago
    Parent updated their post and my comment is no longer relevant.
    - lmilcin 7y ago
      I edited it out before I saw your comment.
    - TallGuyShort 7y ago
      I don't see how it's an insult to the users. It's saying that not allowing ZFS code to be distributed under the GPL and be maintained as part of the Linux kernel, is a disservice to ZFSonLinux users. Which I think is clearly right.
  - lmm 7y ago
    It isn't just ZFS. All sorts of drivers get broken because Linux refuses to offer a stable API, saying your code should be in the kernel, but also often refuses to accept drivers into the kernel, even open-source code with no particular quality issues (e.g. quickcam, reiserfsv4). Use FreeBSD where there's a stable ABI and you don't have these problems.
    - 7y ago
- ploxiln 7y ago
  It's exactly that, when combined with the longstanding practice of maintaining compatibility with userspace, but reserving the right to refactor kernel-space code whenever and wherever needed. If ZFS-on-linux breaks in a subtle or obvious way due to a change in linux, he can't afford to care about that - keeping the linux kernel codebase sane while adding new features, supported hardware, optimizations, and fixes at an honestly scary rate, is not that easy. See also https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/stable-api-nonsense.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/stable-api-no... (fuse is a stable user-space API if you want one ... it won't have the same performance and capabilities of course ...)
  - dathinab 7y ago
    > he can't afford to care about that - keeping the linux kernel codebase sane while adding new features, supported hardware, optimizations, and fixes at an honestly scary rate, is not that easy. Maybe, but the complains seem to be more related to the (problematic) changes not being of technical nature accidentally braking ZFS, but being more of political nature. With speculation that it might have been meant to _intentionally_ brake ZFS and then pretend this was a accident because ZFS isn't (and can never) be maintained in tree. Basically on the line of "we don't like out of tree kernel modules so we make the live hard for them". No idea if this is actually the case or people just spin thinks together. Even if it is the case I'm not sure what I should think about, because it's at least partially somewhat understandably.
    - ploxiln 7y ago
      Linus is rather tolerant (or apathetic) about non-GPL modules, but what he doesn't care to do is ensure that there is an appropriate set of non-GPL-marked exports available for external modules. If some other developer happens to mark some export GPL and it happens to be one key export needed by a non-GPL external module, Linus doesn't care, because he doesn't care about external modules. This has come up many times in the past. Keep in mind that linux has always been GPLv2-only, it is not LGPL or anything like that. https://lwn.net/Articles/769471/ https://lwn.net/Articles/769471/ https://lwn.net/Articles/603131/ https://lwn.net/Articles/603131/ https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/2/7/451 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/2/7/451
shawnz 7y ago
This is nonsense. The problem is not getting ZFS bundled with Linux like he is implying here. The problem is how Linux artificially restricts what APIs your module is able to access based on the license, so you wouldn't be able to use ZFS even by your own prerogative like he is suggesting. He is claiming that it comes down to the user's choice, which would be just fine if that were true. The only problem here is that Linux has purposely taken steps to hinder that choice.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> And I'm not at all interested in some "ZFS shim layer" thing either If there is no "approved" method for creating Linux drivers under licenses other than the GPL, that seems like a major problem that Linux should be working to address. Expecting all Linux drivers to be GPL-licensed is unrealistic and just leads to crappy user experiences. nVidia is never going to release full-featured GPL'd drivers, and even corporative vendors sometimes have NDAs which preclude releasing open source drivers. Linux is able to run proprietary userspace software. Even most open source zealots agree that this is necessary. Why are all drivers expected to use the GPL? --- P.S. Never mind the fact that ZFS is open source, just not GPL compatible. P.P.S. There's a lot of technical underpinnings here that I'll readily admit I don't understand. If I speak out of ignorance, please feel free to correct me.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  There's a unique variable here and that's Oracle. That shouldn't actually matter; it should just depend on the license. But millions in legal fees says otherwise.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- gh123man 7y ago
  I am also not an expert in this space - but if I understand correctly the reason the linux Nvidia driver sucks so much is that it is not GPL'd (or open source at all). There is little incentive for Nvidia to maintain a linux specific driver, but because it is closed source the community cannot improve/fix it. > Why are all drivers expected to use the GPL? I think the answer to this is: drivers are expect to use the GPL if they want to be mainlined and maintained - as Linus said: other than that you are "on your own".
  - puzzledobserver 7y ago
    I would expect a large fraction of Nvidia's GPU sales to be from customers wanting to do machine learning. What platform do these customers typically use? Windows? How do the Linux and Windows drivers compare on matters related to CUDA?
stiray 7y ago
Btrfs crashed for me on two occations, last time, around 2 years back I have installed zfs (which I am using for ~10 years on FreeBSD server) which works like a charm since then. I understand Linus reasoning but there is just no way I will install btrfs, like ever. I rather dont update kernel (I am having zfs on fedora root with degular kernel updates and scripts which verify that everything is with kernel modules prior to reboot) than use file system that crashed twice in two years. Yes it is very annoying if update crashes fs, but currently: - in 2 years two time btrfs crashed itself - in next 2 years update never broke zfs As far as I am concerned, the case for zfs is clear. This might be helpful to someone: https://www.csparks.com/BootFedoraZFS/index.md https://www.csparks.com/BootFedoraZFS/index.md Anyway Linus is going too far with his GPL agenda, the MODUL_LICENSE writting kernel moduls explains why the hardware is less supported on linux - instead of devs. focusing on more support from 3rd party companies, they try to force them to do GPL. Once you set MODUL_LICENSE to non GPL, you quickly figure out that you can't use most of kernel calls. Not the code. Calls.
- bitL 7y ago
  Both ZFS and BTRFS are essentially Oracle now. BTRFS was an effort largely from Oracle to copy SUN's ZFS advantages in a crappy way which became moot once their acquired SUN. ZFS also requires (a lot of) ECC memory for reliable operation. It's a great tech, pity it's dying slow death.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    I’d argue that other file systems also require ECC RAM to maximize reliability. Zfs just makes it much more explicit in their docs and surfaces errors rather than silently handing back any memory corrupted data.
  - rhinoceraptor 7y ago
    ZFS needs ECC just as much as any other file system. That is, it has no way of detecting in memory errors. So if you want your data to actually be written correctly, it's a good idea to use ECC. But the myth that you "need" ECC with ZFS is completely wrong. It would be better if you did have ECC, but don't let that stop you from using ZFS. As far as it needing a lot of memory, that is also not true. The ARC will use your memory if it's available, because it's available! You paid good money for it, so why not actually use it to make things faster?

by Jonnax 7y ago

Hamuko 7y ago

That's his reasoning for not merging ZFS code, not for generally avoiding ZFS.

djsumdog 7y ago
Well he had this: > as far as I can tell, it has no real maintenance behind it either any more Which simply isn't true. They just released a new ZFS version with encryption built in (no more ZFS + LUKS) and they removed the SPL dependency (which didn't support Linux 5.0+ anyway). I use ZFS on my Linux machines for my storage and I've been rather happy with it.
- Covzire 7y ago
  Same, for at least 6 years in a 4 drive zraid array. It always reads and writes at full gigabit ethernet speeds and I haven't had any downtime other than maintaining FreeBSD updates which are trivial even when going from 10.x to 11 to 12.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    Same here (4-drive raidz for many years), though I do have an issue where deleting large files (~1 GB) takes around a minute and nobody seems to know why (I have plenty free space and RAM)...
    - dekhn 7y ago
      do you have lots of snapshots? every snapshotting FS I've worked with has really slow deletes, especially when the volume is near capacity.
      - StavrosK 7y ago
        I have 400 in total, though none on the slow volume :/ That shouldn't affect it, right?
      - rleigh 7y ago
        Snapshots are one thing ZFS is fast at. All the blocks for a given snapshot are placed on a "deadlist". Snapshot deletion is essentially just returning this list of blocks back to the free pool. A terabyte snapshot will take a short while (in the background) to recycle those blocks. But the deletion itself is near instantaneous.
        dekhn 7y ago
        I think you misunderstand: file deletions are what is slow (I don't use ZFS, my reference is WAFL, but my understanding is that all snapshotting file systems have this problem).
        rleigh 7y ago
        Even this should have minimal overhead. If the file is present in the snapshot, then it's simply moving the blocks over to the deadlist which is a very cheap operation. If it's not in the snapshot then the blocks will get recycled in the background. In both cases you should have the unlink complete almost immediately. All of the snapshot functionality is based upon simple transaction number comparisons plus the deadlist of blocks owned by the snapshot. Only the recycling of blocks should have a bit of overhead, and that's done by a background worker--you see the free space increase for a few minutes after a gargantuan snapshot or dataset deletion, but the actual deletion completed immediately.
  - glenneroo 7y ago
    "Same" for the last ~4 years, starting with 8 disks and as of 2018, the 24-bay enclosure is full. Each vdev is a mirrored pair split across HBAs to sedate my paranoia. I've replaced a few drives after watching unreadable sector count slowly increase over a few months. I've also switched out most of the original 3TB pairs to 8TB and 10TB pairs. ~42TB usable and the box only has 16GB of RAM (because I can't get the used 32GB sticks to work, it's a picky mainboard and difficult to find matching ECC memory here in Europe). I haven't powered down much except to attempt to replace the RAM or during extremely hot days. Read/write speed is more or less max gigabit, even during rebuild after hot-swapping drives.
  - vetinari 7y ago
    A single 5400 rpm drive (the like of wd red) should be able to saturate gigabit ethernet. 4 drive array should be basically idling.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Covzire 7y ago
Relevant bits: "Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me. The benchmarks I've seen do not make ZFS look all that great. And as far as I can tell, it has no real maintenance behind it either any more, so from a long-term stability standpoint, why would you ever want to use it in the first place?"
- rleigh 7y ago
  Not sure where that belief comes from. But it might be that many benchmarks are naive and compare it against other filesystems in single-disc setups with zero tuning. Since its metadata overheads are higher, it's definitely slower in this scenario. However, put a pool onto an array of discs and tune it a little, and the performance scales up and up leaving all Linux-native filesystems, and LVM/dm/mdraid, well behind. It's a shame that Linux has nothing compelling to do better than this.
  - Jonnax 7y ago
    Have you seen any benchmarks for the scenario you've described?
  - voltagex_ 7y ago
    Have you got any info on how to do the required tuning that's geared towards a home NAS?
    - HorstG 7y ago
      Group your disks in bunches of 4 or 5 per Raidz, no more. And have them on the same controller or SAS-expander per bunch. Use striping over the bunches. Don't use hotspares, for performance maybe avoid RAIDz6. Try out and benchmark a lot. Get more RAM, lots more RAM.
      - timc3 7y ago
        Back when I setup my last ZFS running on OmniOS 5 disks was not optimal, though i am running RAIDZ2 But yes, lots of RAM
bscphil 7y ago
Well, he says > It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me. So presumably the licensing problem mentioned by your parent's comment is weighing heavily here. I think this "don't use ZFS" statement is most accurately targeted at distro maintainers. Anyone not actually redistributing Linux and ZFS in a way that would (maybe) violate the GPL is not at any risk. That means even large enterprises can get away with using ZoL.
m463 7y ago
"Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me." When he says that, I think on the $500 million Sun spent on advertising java.
- anon73044 7y ago
  Sun isn't going to sue anyone into oblivion any time soon, but Oracle sure will
  - m463 7y ago
    I was thinking more of "the buzzword" bit, and how it got to be such a well known technology.
  - TheFiend7 7y ago
    That's kinda non-sensical IMO. If Oracle, the parent company is trigger happy, there are no guarantees they won't go deeper to protect their children companies IP if they feel they're being infringed.
  - ailideex 7y ago
    Sun is all but defunct, I don't think I would characterize it as a subsidiary of Oracle.
btilly 7y ago
Here are his reasons for generally avoiding ZFS from what I consider most important to least. - The kernel team may break it at any time, and won't care if they do. - It doesn't seem to be well-maintained. - Performance is not that great compared to the alternatives. - Using it opens you up to the threat of lawsuits from Oracle. Given history, this is a real threat. (This is one that should be high for Linus but not for me - there is no conceivable reason that Oracle would want to threaten me with a lawsuit.)
- organsnyder 7y ago
  A former employer was threatened by Oracle because some downloads for the (only free for noncommercial use) VirtualBox Extension Pack came from an IP block owned by the organization. Home users are probably safe, but Oracle's harassment engine has incredible reach.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    Well ... that sounds initially unreasonable, but then if I think about it a bit more I'm not sure how you'd actually enforce a non-commercial use only license without some basic heuristic like "companies are commercial". Is the expectation here that firms offering software under non-commercial-use-is-free licenses just run it entirely on the honour system? And isn't it true that many firms use unlicensed software, hence the need for audits?
    - hackmiester 7y ago
      They harass universities about it too. Which is ludicrous, because universities often have residence halls, and people who live there often download VirtualBox extensions.
      - malty7301 7y ago
        Their PUEL license even has a grant specifically for educational use.
ghaff 7y ago
And he was doing fine up to that point. For IMO good reasons, ZFS will likely never be merged into Linux. And filesystem kernel modules from third parties have a pretty long history of breakage issues going back to some older Unixes. That's going to be plenty of reason not to use ZFS for most people. The licensing by itself is also certainly a showstopper for many. But I'm not sure his other comments are really fair and, had Oracle relicensed ZFS n years back, ZFS would almost certainly be shipping with Linux, whether or not as the typical default I can't say. It certainly wasn't just a buzzword and there were a number of interesting aspects to its approach.
lmilcin 7y ago
The problem with ZFS is that it isn't part of Linux kernel. Linux project maintains compatibility with userspace software but it does not maintain compatibility with 3rd party modules and for a good reason. Since modules have access to any internal kernel API it is not possible to change anything within kernel without considering 3rd party code, if you want to keep that code working. For this reason the decision was made that if you want your module to work you need to make it part of Linux kernel and then if anybody refactors anything they need to consider modules they would be affecting by the change. Not allowing the module to be part of the kernel is a disservice to your user base. While there are modules like that that are maintained moderately successfully (Nvidia, vmware, etc.) this is all at the cost of the user and userspace maintainers who have to deal with it.
- unethical_ban 7y ago
  Parent updated their post and my comment is no longer relevant.
  - lmilcin 7y ago
    I edited it out before I saw your comment.
  - TallGuyShort 7y ago
    I don't see how it's an insult to the users. It's saying that not allowing ZFS code to be distributed under the GPL and be maintained as part of the Linux kernel, is a disservice to ZFSonLinux users. Which I think is clearly right.
- lmm 7y ago
  It isn't just ZFS. All sorts of drivers get broken because Linux refuses to offer a stable API, saying your code should be in the kernel, but also often refuses to accept drivers into the kernel, even open-source code with no particular quality issues (e.g. quickcam, reiserfsv4). Use FreeBSD where there's a stable ABI and you don't have these problems.
  - 7y ago
ploxiln 7y ago
It's exactly that, when combined with the longstanding practice of maintaining compatibility with userspace, but reserving the right to refactor kernel-space code whenever and wherever needed. If ZFS-on-linux breaks in a subtle or obvious way due to a change in linux, he can't afford to care about that - keeping the linux kernel codebase sane while adding new features, supported hardware, optimizations, and fixes at an honestly scary rate, is not that easy. See also https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/stable-api-nonsense.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/stable-api-no... (fuse is a stable user-space API if you want one ... it won't have the same performance and capabilities of course ...)
- dathinab 7y ago
  > he can't afford to care about that - keeping the linux kernel codebase sane while adding new features, supported hardware, optimizations, and fixes at an honestly scary rate, is not that easy. Maybe, but the complains seem to be more related to the (problematic) changes not being of technical nature accidentally braking ZFS, but being more of political nature. With speculation that it might have been meant to _intentionally_ brake ZFS and then pretend this was a accident because ZFS isn't (and can never) be maintained in tree. Basically on the line of "we don't like out of tree kernel modules so we make the live hard for them". No idea if this is actually the case or people just spin thinks together. Even if it is the case I'm not sure what I should think about, because it's at least partially somewhat understandably.
  - ploxiln 7y ago
    Linus is rather tolerant (or apathetic) about non-GPL modules, but what he doesn't care to do is ensure that there is an appropriate set of non-GPL-marked exports available for external modules. If some other developer happens to mark some export GPL and it happens to be one key export needed by a non-GPL external module, Linus doesn't care, because he doesn't care about external modules. This has come up many times in the past. Keep in mind that linux has always been GPLv2-only, it is not LGPL or anything like that. https://lwn.net/Articles/769471/ https://lwn.net/Articles/769471/ https://lwn.net/Articles/603131/ https://lwn.net/Articles/603131/ https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/2/7/451 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/2/7/451

shawnz 7y ago

This is nonsense. The problem is not getting ZFS bundled with Linux like he is implying here. The problem is how Linux artificially restricts what APIs your module is able to access based on the license, so you wouldn't be able to use ZFS even by your own prerogative like he is suggesting. He is claiming that it comes down to the user's choice, which would be just fine if that were true. The only problem here is that Linux has purposely taken steps to hinder that choice.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

> And I'm not at all interested in some "ZFS shim layer" thing either If there is no "approved" method for creating Linux drivers under licenses other than the GPL, that seems like a major problem that Linux should be working to address. Expecting all Linux drivers to be GPL-licensed is unrealistic and just leads to crappy user experiences. nVidia is never going to release full-featured GPL'd drivers, and even corporative vendors sometimes have NDAs which preclude releasing open source drivers. Linux is able to run proprietary userspace software. Even most open source zealots agree that this is necessary. Why are all drivers expected to use the GPL? --- P.S. Never mind the fact that ZFS is open source, just not GPL compatible. P.P.S. There's a lot of technical underpinnings here that I'll readily admit I don't understand. If I speak out of ignorance, please feel free to correct me.

paulddraper 7y ago
There's a unique variable here and that's Oracle. That shouldn't actually matter; it should just depend on the license. But millions in legal fees says otherwise.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
gh123man 7y ago
I am also not an expert in this space - but if I understand correctly the reason the linux Nvidia driver sucks so much is that it is not GPL'd (or open source at all). There is little incentive for Nvidia to maintain a linux specific driver, but because it is closed source the community cannot improve/fix it. > Why are all drivers expected to use the GPL? I think the answer to this is: drivers are expect to use the GPL if they want to be mainlined and maintained - as Linus said: other than that you are "on your own".
- puzzledobserver 7y ago
  I would expect a large fraction of Nvidia's GPU sales to be from customers wanting to do machine learning. What platform do these customers typically use? Windows? How do the Linux and Windows drivers compare on matters related to CUDA?

stiray 7y ago

Btrfs crashed for me on two occations, last time, around 2 years back I have installed zfs (which I am using for ~10 years on FreeBSD server) which works like a charm since then. I understand Linus reasoning but there is just no way I will install btrfs, like ever. I rather dont update kernel (I am having zfs on fedora root with degular kernel updates and scripts which verify that everything is with kernel modules prior to reboot) than use file system that crashed twice in two years. Yes it is very annoying if update crashes fs, but currently: - in 2 years two time btrfs crashed itself - in next 2 years update never broke zfs As far as I am concerned, the case for zfs is clear. This might be helpful to someone: https://www.csparks.com/BootFedoraZFS/index.md https://www.csparks.com/BootFedoraZFS/index.md Anyway Linus is going too far with his GPL agenda, the MODUL_LICENSE writting kernel moduls explains why the hardware is less supported on linux - instead of devs. focusing on more support from 3rd party companies, they try to force them to do GPL. Once you set MODUL_LICENSE to non GPL, you quickly figure out that you can't use most of kernel calls. Not the code. Calls.

bitL 7y ago
Both ZFS and BTRFS are essentially Oracle now. BTRFS was an effort largely from Oracle to copy SUN's ZFS advantages in a crappy way which became moot once their acquired SUN. ZFS also requires (a lot of) ECC memory for reliable operation. It's a great tech, pity it's dying slow death.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  I’d argue that other file systems also require ECC RAM to maximize reliability. Zfs just makes it much more explicit in their docs and surfaces errors rather than silently handing back any memory corrupted data.
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  ZFS needs ECC just as much as any other file system. That is, it has no way of detecting in memory errors. So if you want your data to actually be written correctly, it's a good idea to use ECC. But the myth that you "need" ECC with ZFS is completely wrong. It would be better if you did have ECC, but don't let that stop you from using ZFS. As far as it needing a lot of memory, that is also not true. The ARC will use your memory if it's available, because it's available! You paid good money for it, so why not actually use it to make things faster?