10 ms·

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 the

by 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.
      - secabeen 7y ago
        It does, but it's not 100% clear if administrative employees of universities count as educational. Sure, if you are teaching a class with it, go for it; but running a VM in it for the university accounting office is not as clear.
      - HorstG 7y ago
        Education might not be the same as research in this license's terms. And there are even software vendors picking nits about writing a thesis being either research or education, depending on their mood and purse fill level...
  - smileybarry 7y ago
    IIRC VirtualBox offers to download the Extension Pack without stating it's not free for commercial use. There isn't even a link to the EULA in the download dialog as far as I can tell (from Google Images, at least). Conversely, VirtualBox itself is free for commercial use. Feels more like a honeypot than license auditing. They can also apply stronger heuristics, like popping up a dialogue box if the computer is centrally-managed (e.g.: Mac MDM, Windows domain, Windows Pro/Enterprise, etc.).
    - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
      Wait is this the pack that gets screen resizing and copy/paste working?
      - DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
        A tad offtopic, but on my 2017 Macbook Pro the "pack" was called VMWare Fusion. With my MBP as host and Ubuntu as guest, I found that VirtualBox (with and without guest extensions installed) had a lot of graphical performance issues that Fusion did not.
      - waste_monk 7y ago
        You're thinking of the Guest Additions which is part of the base Virtualbox package and free for commercial use. The (commercially licensed) Extensions pack provide "Support for USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices, VirtualBox RDP, disk encryption, NVMe and PXE boot for Intel cards"[1] and some other functionality e.g. webcam passthrough [2]. There may be additional functionality enabled by the Extension pack I cannot find at a glance, but those are the main things. [1] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads [2] https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing
- talideon 7y ago
  My employer straight up banned the use of VirtualBox entirely _just in case_. They'd rather pay for VMWare Fusion licenses than deal with any potential crap from Oracle.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    Anecdotal, but VirtualBox has always been a bit flaky for me. VMWare Fusion, on the other hand, powers the desktop environment I've used as a daily work machine for the last 6 months, and I've had absolutely zero problems other than trackpad scrolling getting emulated as mouse wheel events (making pixel-perfect scroll impossible). Despite that one annoyance, it's definitely worth paying for if you're using it for any serious or professional purpose.
    - vetinari 7y ago
      On the other hand, VMWare Fusion kernel extension is the only culprit, why I've seen kernel panic on Mac.
  - pizza234 7y ago
    This is throwing the baby along with the bathwater. VirtualBox itself is GPL. There is no lawsuit risk. What requires "commercial considerations" is the extension pack. The extension pack is required for: > USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices, VirtualBox RDP, disk encryption, NVMe and PXE boot for Intel cards If licensing needs to be considered (ie. in a corporate environment), but one doesn't need the functionalities above, then there's no issue.
    - talideon 7y ago
      > This is throwing the baby along with the bathwater. It might be, but let's just say that Oracle aren't big fans of $WORK, and our founders are big fans of them. Thus our legal department are rather tetchy about anything that could give them even the slightest chance of doing anything. > What requires "commercial considerations" is the extension pack. And our legal department are nervous about that being installed, even by accident, so they prefer to minimise the possibility.
shawnz 7y ago
None of these are good reasons to purposely hinder the optional use of ZFS as a third party module by users, which is what Linux is doing.
- spinningslate 7y ago
  Can you expand? I'm no expert - use linux daily but have always just used distro default file system. Linus' reasons for not integrating seems pretty sensible to me. Oracle certainly has form on the litigation front.
  - shawnz 7y ago
    Linus' reasons for not integrating ZFS are absolutely valid and it's no doubt that ZFS can never be included in the mainline kernel. There's absolutely no debate there. However the person he is replying to was not actually asking to have ZFS included in the mainline kernel. As noted above, that could never happen, and I believe that Linus is only bringing it up to deflect from the real issue. What they were actually asking is for Linux to revert a change that was made for no other reason than to hinder the use of ZFS. Linux includes a system which restricts what APIs are available to each module based on the license of the module. GPL modules get the full set of APIs whereas non-GPL modules get a reduced set. This is done strictly for political reasons and has no known legal basis as far as I'm aware. Not too long ago a change was made to reduce the visibility of a certain API required by ZFS so only GPL modules could use it. It's not clear why the change was made, but it was certainly not to improve the functionality of the kernel in any way. So the only plausible explanation to me is that it was done just to hinder the use of ZFS with Linux, which has been a hot political issue for some time now.
    - supercanuck 7y ago
      >This is done strictly for political reasons and has no known legal basis as far as I'm aware. let me stop you right there. This being "Oracle," and its litigious nature, how can you truly be aware or sure? Linus is literally saying there is a legal basis.
pizza234 7y ago
I'm baffled by such arguments. > It doesn't seem to be well-maintained. The last commit is from 3 hours ago: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/commits/master https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/commits/master. They have dozens of commits per month. The last minor release, 0.8, brought significant improvements (my favorite: FS-level encryption). Or maybe this is referred to the 5.0 kernel (initial) incompatibility? That wasn't the ZFS dev team's fault. > Performance is not that great compared to the alternatives. There are no (stable) alternatives. BTRFS certainly not, as it's "under heavy development"¹ (since... forever). > The kernel team may break it at any time, and won't care if they do. That's true, however, the amount is breakage is no different from any other out-of-tree module, and it unlikely to happen with a patch version of a working kernel (in fact, it happen with the 5.0 release). > 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.) "Using" it won't open to lawsuits; ZFS has a CDDL license, which is a free and open-source software license. The problem is (taking Ubuntu as representative) shipping the compiled module along with the kernel, which is an entirely different matter. --- [¹] https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page#Stability_status https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page#Stability_...
- LaGrange 7y ago
  > There are no (stable) alternatives. BTRFS certainly not, as it's "under heavy development"¹ (since... forever). Note that they don't mean "it's unstable," just "there are significant improvements between versions." Most importantly: > The filesystem disk format is stable; this means it is not expected to change unless there are very strong reasons to do so. If there is a format change, filesystems which implement the previous disk format will continue to be mountable and usable by newer kernels. ...and only _new features_ are expected to stabilise: > As with all software, newly added features may need a few releases to stabilize. So overall, at least as far as their own claims go, this is not "heavy development" as in "don't use."
  - disordinary 7y ago
    There's differing opinions of BTRFS's suitability in production - it's the default filesystem of SUSE on one hand, on the other RedHat has deprecated BTRFS support because they see it as not being production ready and they don't see it being production ready in the near future. They also feel that the more legacy linux filesystems have added features to compete.
stock_toaster 7y ago
> - Performance is not that great compared to the alternatives. CoW filesystems do trade performance for data safety. Or did you mean there are other _stable/production_ CoW filesystems with better performance? If so, please do point them out!
- m4rtink 7y ago
  XFS on LVM thin pool LV. Stable and performant as far as I can tell.
  - zlynx 7y ago
    My terrible experiences with thin pools makes me see btrfs as a pool of wonderful, trouble-free and perfect code. Just ask yourself what happens when a thin pool runs out of actual, physical disk blocks?
    - m4rtink 7y ago
      Isn't this a problem for any over provisioned storage pool ? You can avoid that if you want by not over provisioning & checking space consumed by CoW snapshots. Also what does ZFS do if you run out of blocks ? I have actually managed to run out of blocks on XFS on thin LV and it's an interesting experience. XFS always survoved just fine, but some files basically vanished. Looks like mostly those that were open and being written to at exhaustion time, like for example a mariadb database backing store. Files that were just sitting there were perfectly fine as far as I could tell. Still, you definitely should never put data on a volume where a pool can be exhausted, without a backup as I don't think there is really a bulletproof way for a filesystem to handle that happening suddenly.
      - awused 7y ago
        >Isn't this a problem for any over provisioned storage pool ? ZFS doesn't over-provision anything by default. The only case I'm aware of where you can over-provision with ZFS is when you explicitly choose to thin provision zvols (virtual block devices with a fixed size). This can't be done with regular file systems which grow as needed, though you can reserve space for them. File systems do handle running out of space (for a loose definition of handle) but they never expect the underlying block device to run out of space, which is what happens with over-provisioning. That's a problem common to any volume manager that allows you to over provision.
nottorp 7y ago
> There is no conceivable reason that Oracle would want to threaten me with a lawsuit. I don't think it has to be conceivable with Oracle... Unfortunately I have to agree with Linus on this one. Messing with Oracle's stuff is dangerous if you can't afford a comparable legal team.
- boomboomsubban 7y ago
  Linus is distributing the kernel, a very different beast from using a kernel module. I can't imagine Oracle targeting someone for using ZFS on Linux without first establishing that the distribution of ZFS on Linux is illegal.
- markvdb 7y ago
  "Oracle's stuff" can most often be described more accurately as "what Oracle considers its stuff".
bigiain 7y ago
> there is no conceivable reason that Oracle would want to threaten me with a lawsuit. Money. Anecdotally that's the primary reason Oracle do anything.
- eitland 7y ago
  If anyone thinks this is hyperbole : I worked for a tiny startup (>2 devs full time) where Oracle tried to extract money from us because we used MariaDB on AWS. If you think this sounds ridiculous you probably got it right. (Why? Because someone inexperienced with Oracle had filled out the form while downloading the mySQL client.)
  - eitland 7y ago
    Re-reading my comment in daylight I realize I got one detail almost exactly wrong: we were always <= 2 developers, but it seems everyone understood the point anyway - we were tiny, but not too tiny for Oracles licensing department.
  - llcoolv 7y ago
    Well... Serves you about right for choosing MySQL over PostgreSQL :)
    - eitland 7y ago
      In my defense it wasn't my choice ;-)
barkingcat 7y ago
"there is no conceivable reason that Oracle would want to threaten me with a lawsuit." Don't be so sure about this.
gsich 7y ago
>- 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.) No. Distributing (ie. precompiled distro with ZFS) will. You are free to run any software on your machine as you so desire.
kqr 7y ago
This reminds me of the adaptation of a Churchill quote that "ZFS is the worst of the file systems, except for all others."

by btilly 7y ago

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.
    - secabeen 7y ago
      It does, but it's not 100% clear if administrative employees of universities count as educational. Sure, if you are teaching a class with it, go for it; but running a VM in it for the university accounting office is not as clear.
    - HorstG 7y ago
      Education might not be the same as research in this license's terms. And there are even software vendors picking nits about writing a thesis being either research or education, depending on their mood and purse fill level...
- smileybarry 7y ago
  IIRC VirtualBox offers to download the Extension Pack without stating it's not free for commercial use. There isn't even a link to the EULA in the download dialog as far as I can tell (from Google Images, at least). Conversely, VirtualBox itself is free for commercial use. Feels more like a honeypot than license auditing. They can also apply stronger heuristics, like popping up a dialogue box if the computer is centrally-managed (e.g.: Mac MDM, Windows domain, Windows Pro/Enterprise, etc.).
  - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    Wait is this the pack that gets screen resizing and copy/paste working?
    - DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
      A tad offtopic, but on my 2017 Macbook Pro the "pack" was called VMWare Fusion. With my MBP as host and Ubuntu as guest, I found that VirtualBox (with and without guest extensions installed) had a lot of graphical performance issues that Fusion did not.
    - waste_monk 7y ago
      You're thinking of the Guest Additions which is part of the base Virtualbox package and free for commercial use. The (commercially licensed) Extensions pack provide "Support for USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices, VirtualBox RDP, disk encryption, NVMe and PXE boot for Intel cards"[1] and some other functionality e.g. webcam passthrough [2]. There may be additional functionality enabled by the Extension pack I cannot find at a glance, but those are the main things. [1] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads [2] https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing
talideon 7y ago
My employer straight up banned the use of VirtualBox entirely _just in case_. They'd rather pay for VMWare Fusion licenses than deal with any potential crap from Oracle.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  Anecdotal, but VirtualBox has always been a bit flaky for me. VMWare Fusion, on the other hand, powers the desktop environment I've used as a daily work machine for the last 6 months, and I've had absolutely zero problems other than trackpad scrolling getting emulated as mouse wheel events (making pixel-perfect scroll impossible). Despite that one annoyance, it's definitely worth paying for if you're using it for any serious or professional purpose.
  - vetinari 7y ago
    On the other hand, VMWare Fusion kernel extension is the only culprit, why I've seen kernel panic on Mac.
- pizza234 7y ago
  This is throwing the baby along with the bathwater. VirtualBox itself is GPL. There is no lawsuit risk. What requires "commercial considerations" is the extension pack. The extension pack is required for: > USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices, VirtualBox RDP, disk encryption, NVMe and PXE boot for Intel cards If licensing needs to be considered (ie. in a corporate environment), but one doesn't need the functionalities above, then there's no issue.
  - talideon 7y ago
    > This is throwing the baby along with the bathwater. It might be, but let's just say that Oracle aren't big fans of $WORK, and our founders are big fans of them. Thus our legal department are rather tetchy about anything that could give them even the slightest chance of doing anything. > What requires "commercial considerations" is the extension pack. And our legal department are nervous about that being installed, even by accident, so they prefer to minimise the possibility.

shawnz 7y ago

None of these are good reasons to purposely hinder the optional use of ZFS as a third party module by users, which is what Linux is doing.

spinningslate 7y ago
Can you expand? I'm no expert - use linux daily but have always just used distro default file system. Linus' reasons for not integrating seems pretty sensible to me. Oracle certainly has form on the litigation front.
- shawnz 7y ago
  Linus' reasons for not integrating ZFS are absolutely valid and it's no doubt that ZFS can never be included in the mainline kernel. There's absolutely no debate there. However the person he is replying to was not actually asking to have ZFS included in the mainline kernel. As noted above, that could never happen, and I believe that Linus is only bringing it up to deflect from the real issue. What they were actually asking is for Linux to revert a change that was made for no other reason than to hinder the use of ZFS. Linux includes a system which restricts what APIs are available to each module based on the license of the module. GPL modules get the full set of APIs whereas non-GPL modules get a reduced set. This is done strictly for political reasons and has no known legal basis as far as I'm aware. Not too long ago a change was made to reduce the visibility of a certain API required by ZFS so only GPL modules could use it. It's not clear why the change was made, but it was certainly not to improve the functionality of the kernel in any way. So the only plausible explanation to me is that it was done just to hinder the use of ZFS with Linux, which has been a hot political issue for some time now.
  - supercanuck 7y ago
    >This is done strictly for political reasons and has no known legal basis as far as I'm aware. let me stop you right there. This being "Oracle," and its litigious nature, how can you truly be aware or sure? Linus is literally saying there is a legal basis.

pizza234 7y ago

I'm baffled by such arguments. > It doesn't seem to be well-maintained. The last commit is from 3 hours ago: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/commits/master https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/commits/master. They have dozens of commits per month. The last minor release, 0.8, brought significant improvements (my favorite: FS-level encryption). Or maybe this is referred to the 5.0 kernel (initial) incompatibility? That wasn't the ZFS dev team's fault. > Performance is not that great compared to the alternatives. There are no (stable) alternatives. BTRFS certainly not, as it's "under heavy development"¹ (since... forever). > The kernel team may break it at any time, and won't care if they do. That's true, however, the amount is breakage is no different from any other out-of-tree module, and it unlikely to happen with a patch version of a working kernel (in fact, it happen with the 5.0 release). > 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.) "Using" it won't open to lawsuits; ZFS has a CDDL license, which is a free and open-source software license. The problem is (taking Ubuntu as representative) shipping the compiled module along with the kernel, which is an entirely different matter. --- [¹] https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page#Stability_status https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page#Stability_...

LaGrange 7y ago
> There are no (stable) alternatives. BTRFS certainly not, as it's "under heavy development"¹ (since... forever). Note that they don't mean "it's unstable," just "there are significant improvements between versions." Most importantly: > The filesystem disk format is stable; this means it is not expected to change unless there are very strong reasons to do so. If there is a format change, filesystems which implement the previous disk format will continue to be mountable and usable by newer kernels. ...and only _new features_ are expected to stabilise: > As with all software, newly added features may need a few releases to stabilize. So overall, at least as far as their own claims go, this is not "heavy development" as in "don't use."
- disordinary 7y ago
  There's differing opinions of BTRFS's suitability in production - it's the default filesystem of SUSE on one hand, on the other RedHat has deprecated BTRFS support because they see it as not being production ready and they don't see it being production ready in the near future. They also feel that the more legacy linux filesystems have added features to compete.

stock_toaster 7y ago

> - Performance is not that great compared to the alternatives. CoW filesystems do trade performance for data safety. Or did you mean there are other _stable/production_ CoW filesystems with better performance? If so, please do point them out!

m4rtink 7y ago
XFS on LVM thin pool LV. Stable and performant as far as I can tell.
- zlynx 7y ago
  My terrible experiences with thin pools makes me see btrfs as a pool of wonderful, trouble-free and perfect code. Just ask yourself what happens when a thin pool runs out of actual, physical disk blocks?
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    Isn't this a problem for any over provisioned storage pool ? You can avoid that if you want by not over provisioning & checking space consumed by CoW snapshots. Also what does ZFS do if you run out of blocks ? I have actually managed to run out of blocks on XFS on thin LV and it's an interesting experience. XFS always survoved just fine, but some files basically vanished. Looks like mostly those that were open and being written to at exhaustion time, like for example a mariadb database backing store. Files that were just sitting there were perfectly fine as far as I could tell. Still, you definitely should never put data on a volume where a pool can be exhausted, without a backup as I don't think there is really a bulletproof way for a filesystem to handle that happening suddenly.
    - awused 7y ago
      >Isn't this a problem for any over provisioned storage pool ? ZFS doesn't over-provision anything by default. The only case I'm aware of where you can over-provision with ZFS is when you explicitly choose to thin provision zvols (virtual block devices with a fixed size). This can't be done with regular file systems which grow as needed, though you can reserve space for them. File systems do handle running out of space (for a loose definition of handle) but they never expect the underlying block device to run out of space, which is what happens with over-provisioning. That's a problem common to any volume manager that allows you to over provision.

nottorp 7y ago

> There is no conceivable reason that Oracle would want to threaten me with a lawsuit. I don't think it has to be conceivable with Oracle... Unfortunately I have to agree with Linus on this one. Messing with Oracle's stuff is dangerous if you can't afford a comparable legal team.

boomboomsubban 7y ago
Linus is distributing the kernel, a very different beast from using a kernel module. I can't imagine Oracle targeting someone for using ZFS on Linux without first establishing that the distribution of ZFS on Linux is illegal.
markvdb 7y ago
"Oracle's stuff" can most often be described more accurately as "what Oracle considers its stuff".

bigiain 7y ago

> there is no conceivable reason that Oracle would want to threaten me with a lawsuit. Money. Anecdotally that's the primary reason Oracle do anything.

eitland 7y ago
If anyone thinks this is hyperbole : I worked for a tiny startup (>2 devs full time) where Oracle tried to extract money from us because we used MariaDB on AWS. If you think this sounds ridiculous you probably got it right. (Why? Because someone inexperienced with Oracle had filled out the form while downloading the mySQL client.)
- eitland 7y ago
  Re-reading my comment in daylight I realize I got one detail almost exactly wrong: we were always <= 2 developers, but it seems everyone understood the point anyway - we were tiny, but not too tiny for Oracles licensing department.
- llcoolv 7y ago
  Well... Serves you about right for choosing MySQL over PostgreSQL :)
  - eitland 7y ago
    In my defense it wasn't my choice ;-)

barkingcat 7y ago

"there is no conceivable reason that Oracle would want to threaten me with a lawsuit." Don't be so sure about this.

gsich 7y ago

>- 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.) No. Distributing (ie. precompiled distro with ZFS) will. You are free to run any software on your machine as you so desire.

kqr 7y ago

This reminds me of the adaptation of a Churchill quote that "ZFS is the worst of the file systems, except for all others."