8 ms·

ZFS is great but aren't we better off focusing on something else like btrfs? The whole licensing situation makes me nervous to adopt this.

Hackbraten 6y ago
I like ZFS because it’s available on so many platforms, even macOS. It allows me to use the same snapshot-based backup process for all my machines. Still, I’d love to see more people adopt btrfs because I think diversity in filesystems is a good thing.
- sneak 6y ago
  ZFS support on macOS has been barely beta-quality for at least five years. I wish it were actually cross-platform, but it really only works well on Linux and FreeBSD.
  - Hackbraten 6y ago
    Can you elaborate about the beta quality? I’ve been using it on macOS as my daily driver for about two years now. Maybe it has improved?
    - sneak 6y ago
      I've tried 4 or 5 times over the last 3 or 5 years to use it on macOS and I've been rewarded with hangs, corruption, kernel panics. For something as critical as a filesystem, it's just not ready.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > I like ZFS because it’s available on so many platforms, even macOS. I like btrfs because it is just a `cinst winbtrfs` away on win32
  - baq 6y ago
    how is it possible that something created by basically one dude in his spare time on windows is working well when there are dozens of developers trying to implement it correctly in the linux kernel? or perhaps my impression after this recommendation is wrong and this actually isn't working well? much confuse
    - jcelerier 6y ago
      > how is it possible that something created by basically one dude in his spare time on windows is working well when there are dozens of developers trying to implement it correctly in the linux kernel? I don't think there is any case where this WinBTRFS would work better than the Linux implementation, but the Linux implementation is solid enough - if BTRFS is good enough for Synology NASes (https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/Btrfs https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/Btrfs), it's good enough for me. I wonder what led you to this line of thinking though. It reminds me of people being amazed at $NEWER_TECH just because it had less time to accumulate bug reports.
hestefisk 6y ago
I think Ubuntu adoption of ZFS is a testament that it is here to stay. Btrfs still has some issues (eg stability), which ZFS simply doesn’t have. It’s rock solid.
- gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
  Fedora is going to BTRFS. I guess that means it is being at least considered for RHEL 9 or 10. I can't see RH choosing ZFS unless the license is sorted out.
  - throwaway8941 6y ago
    I have no relation to either Fedora or RH, but have gone through quite a bit of their mailing lists in the past few months. Fedora adopting btrfs has nothing to do with RHEL and they don't seem to be considering it at all. Red Hat threw all their weight behind XFS with advanced features being added mostly through separate layers (e.g. stratis).
    - gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
      I also have no relationship to RH other than as a user of their free stuff. Yes when it became apparent that BTRFS was not ready RH did that. It was a slight surprise when it happened if I remember correctly. I said RHEL v9 OR 10. I guess 9 is unlikely but 10 is a number of years off. If BTFS is a sucess on Fedora and stable then they will surely consider it. That is the point of Fedora...
      - freedomben 6y ago
        I work for Red Hat but have no insight into any of the Stratis/Btrfs/etc stuff. I'm just a long time Fedora user. I would agree with you. Fedora adopting stuff does not mean RHEL will include it, but if it's successful/popular on Fedora then Red Hat will surely be paying attention. RHEL tries to follow Fedora as closely as possible, I would imagine this is a shot for btrfs, but certainly no guarantee.
  - 6y ago
throw0101a 6y ago
> ZFS is great but aren't we better off focusing on something else like btrfs? Btrfs was originally introduced in Linux 2.6.29 in March 2009. It is still flakey in many situations. ZFS was first release in Solaris 10 6/06 in June 2006, with it being open source almost right away. OpenZFS was forked in August 2010. Should Btrfs at some point simply be declared a sunk cost and something new be created? Because from the outside it looks like it's hardly gaining any traction because of its reputation for eating data (maybe only with its RAID code, but still).
- lima 6y ago
  Btrfs is in large-scale production use by a number of companies, including Facebook, who are active contributors. ZFS will never be part of the Linux kernel due to both licensing issues and it including its own crypto, cache and other subsystems. Personally I have high hopes for bcachefs, but Btrfs is here to stay.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Just a note for other people excited about bcachefs, you can potentially speed things up by joining Kent's patreon https://www.patreon.com/bcachefs https://www.patreon.com/bcachefs
  - danudey 6y ago
    > Btrfs is here to stay btrfs was removed from RHEL because RedHat themselves don't have the time or energy to support it or support systems using it. That's going to hurt adoption. Ubuntu is working actively towards ZFS as an available/default option, and once it is there's not much point in using btrfs unless you have specific use cases. Everyone else I know either uses ZFS or XFS in production. For my systems, I would definitely not trust btrfs with critical data. Here's the thing: btrfs is 'fine', but it's not 'good'. It's the only filesystem since 2001 where I've suffered unrecoverable filesystem corruption as a result of a power outage (on a fresh 18.04 installation last November) and had to salvage data and reinstall. The tooling, in a lot of cases, does the opposite of ZFS and touts it as a feature. For example, snapshots are not recursive and they say that this is great for if you want to snapshot / but not /home; this is true, but it also means that I cannot subdivide datasets. For example, on ZFS I divide up /var/lib/mysql/ into /var/lib/mysql/tablespace/ and var/lib/mysql/logdb, for example, since both of those have different access patterns and block sizes (16k and 128k respectively). ZFS lets me do this to optimize reads and writes, but I can also atomically snapshot them both. btrfs doesn't let me do an atomic, recursive snapshot at all (and I'm not sure if it can handle different block sizes per subvolume either). Basically, ZFS is a better, production-ready, enterprise-proven, and surprisingly intuitive filesystem and volume management system, and has been for 14 years. btrfs has weird tooling, incomplete features (which they don't just remove from the roadmap for some reason), data loss issues, and the only large-scale use I've heard of it Facebook, who also work on it (easier to use btrfs when you've hired all the experts). With Ubuntu shipping ZFS enabled by default, most reasons to use btrfs go away; it's not mainlined in the kernel, but that doesn't matter if your distribution has it enabled and supported by default.
abrookewood 6y ago
I don't think this deserves the down votes. I love ZFS, use ZFS and I'd still say that the licensing issue is real. Just because Oracle hasn't sued Canonical doesn't mean they can't or won't.
- hnlmorg 6y ago
  Please excuse the ignorant question, but what grounds would Oracle have to sue Canonical? OpenZFS is still open source and available on FreeBSD (amongst others). The licence might not be GPL compatible but the way ZFS is shipped on Linux there isn't any GPL/CDDL mixed code bases (and it's not like there isn't already a long history of GPL-incompatible software licences with Linux kernel modules anyway).
  - jblwps 6y ago
    IIRC, The GPL incompatibility prohibits distribution of linked binaries. Since the CDDL-licensed ZFS kernel modules have to be linked against the kernel, those compiled modules can't be distributed. Hence, Canonical (or anyone else trying to re-release under the CDDL) cannot distribute binaries of the kernel modules. However, you are fully allowed to compile and link the two on your own. This is why the alternative to binary distribution is compiling yourself with the help of DKMS.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      With the two licenses incompatibility, the GPL is the one that would be violated, not the CDDL. So any Linux contributor would have the right to sue, including Oracle who presumably have committed to Linux. However, Oracle owning ZFS gives them no extra grounds to sue over OpenZFS.
  - diffeomorphism 6y ago
    "The way it is shipped" differs by distro and the message by non-ubuntu distros is that the way ubuntu ships zfs seems legally risky to them. Ubuntu disagrees and they might be right (isle of man jurisdiction IIRC?), but their legal theory has not been tested and oracle has a reputation.
gruturo 6y ago
BTRFS at this point feels a lot like a sunk cost fallacy - it proved its unreliability too many times over the years, and working on it feels like throwing good money after bad. Understandably some people may be more interested in not losing their data than the licensing headaches it may come with, so ZFS it is. Some, like yours truly, run FreeBSD on their NAS, where there are no license issues either, and are very happy it rebased on OpenZFS recently.
- brmgb 6y ago
  > it proved its unreliability too many times over the years, and working on it feels like throwing good money after bad. Btrfs has been working fine for years and is used largely at Facebook. RAID 5 and RAID 6 are still unstable (and marked as such) but the rest just works.
  - protomyth 6y ago
    > Btrfs has been working fine for years and is used largely at Facebook. RAID 5 and RAID 6 are still unstable (and marked as such) but the rest just works. I get the feeling that if you are a ZFS user then RAID 5 & 6 not working is just a deal breaker.
    - brmgb 6y ago
      Not having RAID 5 and 6 is not ideal, yes. Then again, I will hasard than most potential users, including home NAS users, have at most two HDD. Btrfs also has some advantages for personal use when you compare it to ZFS: it supports combining disks of different sizes and is easier to grow.
      - protomyth 6y ago
        home NAS users, have at most two HDD. I think that's wrong. A lot of 4 drive models are in stores end users shop.
        6y ago
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
ZFS is great but I have no clue why anyone would use Oracle software when Btrfs is an option.
- craftkiller 6y ago
  Btrfs has lost all the data on my harddrives twice. ZFS has never lost any of my data. That is why.
  - rleigh 6y ago
    Likewise. Not even using RAID 5 or 6, just RAID 1. Completely destroyed all the data on both mirrors. Truly terrible. When the error codepaths are this poorly tested, it does not inspire confidence. I believe the bug which caused this is now fixed, but who really knows what other nasties linger on waiting to be triggered. In comparison, ZFS has been a dream. I even moved terabytes of data between a Linux system and a FreeBSD server simply by swapping the discs over and running "zpool import". Superb data portability.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  Btrfs started at Oracle.

Hackbraten 6y ago

I like ZFS because it’s available on so many platforms, even macOS. It allows me to use the same snapshot-based backup process for all my machines. Still, I’d love to see more people adopt btrfs because I think diversity in filesystems is a good thing.

sneak 6y ago
ZFS support on macOS has been barely beta-quality for at least five years. I wish it were actually cross-platform, but it really only works well on Linux and FreeBSD.
- Hackbraten 6y ago
  Can you elaborate about the beta quality? I’ve been using it on macOS as my daily driver for about two years now. Maybe it has improved?
  - sneak 6y ago
    I've tried 4 or 5 times over the last 3 or 5 years to use it on macOS and I've been rewarded with hangs, corruption, kernel panics. For something as critical as a filesystem, it's just not ready.
jcelerier 6y ago
> I like ZFS because it’s available on so many platforms, even macOS. I like btrfs because it is just a `cinst winbtrfs` away on win32
- baq 6y ago
  how is it possible that something created by basically one dude in his spare time on windows is working well when there are dozens of developers trying to implement it correctly in the linux kernel? or perhaps my impression after this recommendation is wrong and this actually isn't working well? much confuse
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    > how is it possible that something created by basically one dude in his spare time on windows is working well when there are dozens of developers trying to implement it correctly in the linux kernel? I don't think there is any case where this WinBTRFS would work better than the Linux implementation, but the Linux implementation is solid enough - if BTRFS is good enough for Synology NASes (https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/Btrfs https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/Btrfs), it's good enough for me. I wonder what led you to this line of thinking though. It reminds me of people being amazed at $NEWER_TECH just because it had less time to accumulate bug reports.

hestefisk 6y ago

I think Ubuntu adoption of ZFS is a testament that it is here to stay. Btrfs still has some issues (eg stability), which ZFS simply doesn’t have. It’s rock solid.

gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
Fedora is going to BTRFS. I guess that means it is being at least considered for RHEL 9 or 10. I can't see RH choosing ZFS unless the license is sorted out.
- throwaway8941 6y ago
  I have no relation to either Fedora or RH, but have gone through quite a bit of their mailing lists in the past few months. Fedora adopting btrfs has nothing to do with RHEL and they don't seem to be considering it at all. Red Hat threw all their weight behind XFS with advanced features being added mostly through separate layers (e.g. stratis).
  - gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
    I also have no relationship to RH other than as a user of their free stuff. Yes when it became apparent that BTRFS was not ready RH did that. It was a slight surprise when it happened if I remember correctly. I said RHEL v9 OR 10. I guess 9 is unlikely but 10 is a number of years off. If BTFS is a sucess on Fedora and stable then they will surely consider it. That is the point of Fedora...
    - freedomben 6y ago
      I work for Red Hat but have no insight into any of the Stratis/Btrfs/etc stuff. I'm just a long time Fedora user. I would agree with you. Fedora adopting stuff does not mean RHEL will include it, but if it's successful/popular on Fedora then Red Hat will surely be paying attention. RHEL tries to follow Fedora as closely as possible, I would imagine this is a shot for btrfs, but certainly no guarantee.
- 6y ago

throw0101a 6y ago

> ZFS is great but aren't we better off focusing on something else like btrfs? Btrfs was originally introduced in Linux 2.6.29 in March 2009. It is still flakey in many situations. ZFS was first release in Solaris 10 6/06 in June 2006, with it being open source almost right away. OpenZFS was forked in August 2010. Should Btrfs at some point simply be declared a sunk cost and something new be created? Because from the outside it looks like it's hardly gaining any traction because of its reputation for eating data (maybe only with its RAID code, but still).

lima 6y ago
Btrfs is in large-scale production use by a number of companies, including Facebook, who are active contributors. ZFS will never be part of the Linux kernel due to both licensing issues and it including its own crypto, cache and other subsystems. Personally I have high hopes for bcachefs, but Btrfs is here to stay.
- viraptor 6y ago
  Just a note for other people excited about bcachefs, you can potentially speed things up by joining Kent's patreon https://www.patreon.com/bcachefs https://www.patreon.com/bcachefs
- danudey 6y ago
  > Btrfs is here to stay btrfs was removed from RHEL because RedHat themselves don't have the time or energy to support it or support systems using it. That's going to hurt adoption. Ubuntu is working actively towards ZFS as an available/default option, and once it is there's not much point in using btrfs unless you have specific use cases. Everyone else I know either uses ZFS or XFS in production. For my systems, I would definitely not trust btrfs with critical data. Here's the thing: btrfs is 'fine', but it's not 'good'. It's the only filesystem since 2001 where I've suffered unrecoverable filesystem corruption as a result of a power outage (on a fresh 18.04 installation last November) and had to salvage data and reinstall. The tooling, in a lot of cases, does the opposite of ZFS and touts it as a feature. For example, snapshots are not recursive and they say that this is great for if you want to snapshot / but not /home; this is true, but it also means that I cannot subdivide datasets. For example, on ZFS I divide up /var/lib/mysql/ into /var/lib/mysql/tablespace/ and var/lib/mysql/logdb, for example, since both of those have different access patterns and block sizes (16k and 128k respectively). ZFS lets me do this to optimize reads and writes, but I can also atomically snapshot them both. btrfs doesn't let me do an atomic, recursive snapshot at all (and I'm not sure if it can handle different block sizes per subvolume either). Basically, ZFS is a better, production-ready, enterprise-proven, and surprisingly intuitive filesystem and volume management system, and has been for 14 years. btrfs has weird tooling, incomplete features (which they don't just remove from the roadmap for some reason), data loss issues, and the only large-scale use I've heard of it Facebook, who also work on it (easier to use btrfs when you've hired all the experts). With Ubuntu shipping ZFS enabled by default, most reasons to use btrfs go away; it's not mainlined in the kernel, but that doesn't matter if your distribution has it enabled and supported by default.

abrookewood 6y ago

I don't think this deserves the down votes. I love ZFS, use ZFS and I'd still say that the licensing issue is real. Just because Oracle hasn't sued Canonical doesn't mean they can't or won't.

hnlmorg 6y ago
Please excuse the ignorant question, but what grounds would Oracle have to sue Canonical? OpenZFS is still open source and available on FreeBSD (amongst others). The licence might not be GPL compatible but the way ZFS is shipped on Linux there isn't any GPL/CDDL mixed code bases (and it's not like there isn't already a long history of GPL-incompatible software licences with Linux kernel modules anyway).
- jblwps 6y ago
  IIRC, The GPL incompatibility prohibits distribution of linked binaries. Since the CDDL-licensed ZFS kernel modules have to be linked against the kernel, those compiled modules can't be distributed. Hence, Canonical (or anyone else trying to re-release under the CDDL) cannot distribute binaries of the kernel modules. However, you are fully allowed to compile and link the two on your own. This is why the alternative to binary distribution is compiling yourself with the help of DKMS.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    With the two licenses incompatibility, the GPL is the one that would be violated, not the CDDL. So any Linux contributor would have the right to sue, including Oracle who presumably have committed to Linux. However, Oracle owning ZFS gives them no extra grounds to sue over OpenZFS.
- diffeomorphism 6y ago
  "The way it is shipped" differs by distro and the message by non-ubuntu distros is that the way ubuntu ships zfs seems legally risky to them. Ubuntu disagrees and they might be right (isle of man jurisdiction IIRC?), but their legal theory has not been tested and oracle has a reputation.

gruturo 6y ago

BTRFS at this point feels a lot like a sunk cost fallacy - it proved its unreliability too many times over the years, and working on it feels like throwing good money after bad. Understandably some people may be more interested in not losing their data than the licensing headaches it may come with, so ZFS it is. Some, like yours truly, run FreeBSD on their NAS, where there are no license issues either, and are very happy it rebased on OpenZFS recently.

brmgb 6y ago
> it proved its unreliability too many times over the years, and working on it feels like throwing good money after bad. Btrfs has been working fine for years and is used largely at Facebook. RAID 5 and RAID 6 are still unstable (and marked as such) but the rest just works.
- protomyth 6y ago
  > Btrfs has been working fine for years and is used largely at Facebook. RAID 5 and RAID 6 are still unstable (and marked as such) but the rest just works. I get the feeling that if you are a ZFS user then RAID 5 & 6 not working is just a deal breaker.
  - brmgb 6y ago
    Not having RAID 5 and 6 is not ideal, yes. Then again, I will hasard than most potential users, including home NAS users, have at most two HDD. Btrfs also has some advantages for personal use when you compare it to ZFS: it supports combining disks of different sizes and is easier to grow.
    - protomyth 6y ago
      home NAS users, have at most two HDD. I think that's wrong. A lot of 4 drive models are in stores end users shop.
      - 6y ago

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

ZFS is great but I have no clue why anyone would use Oracle software when Btrfs is an option.

craftkiller 6y ago
Btrfs has lost all the data on my harddrives twice. ZFS has never lost any of my data. That is why.
- rleigh 6y ago
  Likewise. Not even using RAID 5 or 6, just RAID 1. Completely destroyed all the data on both mirrors. Truly terrible. When the error codepaths are this poorly tested, it does not inspire confidence. I believe the bug which caused this is now fixed, but who really knows what other nasties linger on waiting to be triggered. In comparison, ZFS has been a dream. I even moved terabytes of data between a Linux system and a FreeBSD server simply by swapping the discs over and running "zpool import". Superb data portability.
pseudalopex 6y ago
Btrfs started at Oracle.