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I'll believe it when I see it, why anyone uses BTRFs (UnRaid or any other form of software raid that isn't ZFS) is still beyond me. At least when we're not tal

• jbverschoor 5y ago
  Licensing. Similarly, otherwise it would've been included in macOS a long time ago (as the default fs according to some..)
  • bsder 5y ago
    I do believe that the license was fine for macOS but when Oracle bought Sun that killed it cold. Jobs never liked anybody other than himself holding all the cards. Having Ellison and Oracle holding the keys to ZFS was just never going to fly.
    • ghaff 5y ago
      It's a combination of the license and the fact that it's Oracle, of all entities, that owns the copyright. Perhaps either one by itself wouldn't be a dealbreaker but the combination is. And, of course, Oracle could have changed the license at any time after buying Sun. (Of course, Jobs may have just decided he didn't want to depend on someone else for the MacOS filesystem in any case.) ADDED: And as others noted, there were also some storage patent-related issues with Sun. So just a lot of potential complications.
    • spullara 5y ago
      I had ZFS on a Mac from Apple for a short amount of time during one of the betas :( I think TimeMachine was going to be based on it but they pulled out.
      • codetrotter 5y ago
        FYI there is a third-party effort for making OpenZFS usable on macOS. https://openzfsonosx.org/ https://openzfsonosx.org/ I used it for a while but unfortunately since they are not many people working on this and they are not working on it full time it can take them a good while from a new version of macOS is released until OpenZFS is usable with that version of macOS. This was certainly the case a while ago and why I stopped using OpenZFS on macOS and went back to only using ZFS on FreeBSD and Linux instead of additionally using it on macOS. So with my Mac computers I only use APFS.
    • qaq 5y ago
      Jobs and Ellison were really close friends
      • jamiek88 5y ago
        And also cold hearted clear eyed businessmen unlikely to allow friendship to affect their corporations. I’d love to be a fly on the wall for some of those conversations.
    • tw04 5y ago
      That makes absolutely no sense. Jobs and Ellison were best friends. Oracle acquiring Sun would have made it MORE attractive, not less. https://www.cnet.com/news/larry-ellison-talks-about-his-best-friend-steve-jobs-final-days/ https://www.cnet.com/news/larry-ellison-talks-about-his-best...
  • ghaff 5y ago
    And it's arguably even a bigger issue on Linux distros.
    • mnd999 5y ago
      It’s a moderate pain on Linux and then only really that if you’re running on something bleeding-edge like Arch. Otherwise it’s just a kernel module like any other.
      • ghaff 5y ago
        But it doesn't ship with either Red Hat or SUSE distros, which is an issue for supported commercial use.
  • justaguy88 5y ago
    Whats Oracle's play here, do they somehow make money out of ZFS which makes them reluctant to re-license it?
    • sneak 5y ago
      Is there a CLA for OpenZFS/ZoL? I don't believe there is, so I don't think Oracle can unilaterally relicense it.
      • rincebrain 5y ago
        Even if there were a CLA for OpenZFS, it wouldn't affect Oracle's inability to relicense the whole thing. They could relicense their codebase, of course, but the number of changes that have happened since they diverged is not small.
        • jen20 5y ago
          A CLA and copyright assignment was how Oracle were able to make (now Oracle) ZFS proprietary again in the first place. As you say though, OpenZFS and Oracle ZFS have diverged quite a bit, and most of the world is now based around the OpenZFS variant that acts as the upstream for Linux, FreeBSD and even Windows variants.
  • jen20 5y ago
    The licensing is nothing to do with it on OSX - indeed DTrace (also under the CDDL) has been shipping in it for years.
  • tw04 5y ago
    The reason it didn’t end up in macOS is because NetApp sued Sun for patent infringement. Apple wanted nothing to do with that lawsuit and quickly abandoned the project. As others have stated, dtrace has the exact same license and has been in MacOS for years.
• auxym 5y ago
  RAM? Everytime I looked into setting up a freenas box, every hardware guide insisted that ungodly amounts of absolutely-has-to-be-ECC RAM was essential, and I just gave up at that point.
  • n8ta 5y ago
    The freenas hardware requirements themselves say "8 GB RAM (ECC recommended but not required)" https://www.freenas.org/hardware-requirements/ https://www.freenas.org/hardware-requirements/ I myself use freenas with 16GB of non-ECC ram. Of course it is possible to have a bit flip in memory that is then dutifully stored incorrectly by ZFS to disk, but this was a possibility without ZFS as well. I've actually been waiting for this feature for since I first setup my pool. It seemed theoretically possible we were just waiting for an implementation.
  • dsr_ 5y ago
    Neither quantity nor ECC is essential. ZFS defaults to assuming it is the primary reason for your box to exist, but it only takes two lines to define more reasonable RAM usage: zfs_arc_min and zfs_arc_max. On a NAS type server, I would think setting the max to half of your RAM is reasonable. Maybe 3/4 if you never do anything except storage. ECC is not recommended because ZFS has some kind of special vulnerability without it; ECC is recommended because ZFS has taken care of all the more likely chances of undetectable corruption, so that's the next step.
    • fpoling 5y ago
      It is not that simple regarding ECC. Since ZFS uses more memory, the probability of hitting a memory bug is simply higher with it.
      • amarshall 5y ago
        But it doesn’t really use more memory. The ARC gives the impression of high memory usage because it’s different than the OS page cache and usually called out explicitly and not ignored in many monitoring tools like the OS cache is. Linux—without ZFS—will happily consume nearly all RAM with any filesystem if enough data is read and written.
• donmcronald 5y ago
  BTRFS was useful for me. When those (RAID5) parity patches got rejected many, many years ago for non-technical reasons like not matching a business case/goal or similar, it changed my view of open source. That was the day I realized that some open source participants and supporters are interested in having open source projects that are good enough to act as a barrier to entry, but not good enough to compete with their commercial offerings. Judge the world from that perspective for a while and it can help to explain why so much open source feels 80% done and never gets the last 20% of the polish needed to make it great.
  • exikyut 5y ago
    > (RAID5) parity patches got rejected many, many years ago Ooooh. (Booo!) I wouldn't mind a citation/mailinglist reference for this, if you have one. (I honestly have no idea what I'd Google.)
    • donmcronald 5y ago
      http://web.archive.org/web/20150301234243/blog.ronnyegner-consulting.de/2014/12/10/parity-based-redundancy-raid56triple-parity-and-beyond-on-btrfs-and-mdadm-dec-2014/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150301234243/blog.ronnyegner-co... It's in the quotes from the offline (not on a mailing list) follow up, so it's all hearsay. I should be clear, I don't necessarily mean I think the developers are complicit in that. I think what happens is more subtle. IE: Companies sponsor the project just enough to be the biggest open source product in the space, but not enough for the developers to make it great. Or as an alternative conspiracy theory, companies sponsor the projects of great developers that build awesome core features, but never give enough support for someone to turn that into a marketable product. That way they can usurp the work for their own products. I know there's a lot of speculation there, but, if you watch for it, you can see how most entrenched tech companies are really, really taking advantage of open source developers. Basically the people who are passionate and want to build great things are getting hugely ripped off by people with yachts and rockets.
      • exikyut 5y ago
• gregmac 5y ago
  For my big media volume, which had existed for around 10 years, I use snapraid. Because of several things: * I can mix disk sizes * I can add new disks over time as needed * If something dies, up to the entire server, I can just stick any data disk in another system and read it I didn't want to become a zfs expert (and the learning curve seems steep!), and I didn't want to spend thousands of dollars on new gear (dedicated NAS box and a bunch of matched-size disks). I repurposed my old workstation into a server, spent a few hours getting it set up, and it works. I've had two disks fail (one data, one parity, and recovered from both). Every time I've added a new disk, it's been 50-100% larger than my existing disks. I've also migrated the entire setup to a new system (newer old retired workstation), running proxmox, and was pleasantly surprised it only took about an hour to get that volume back up (incidentally, that server runs zfs as well.. I just don't use it for my large media storage volume).
  • joshstrange 5y ago
    UnRaid and Synology user here and I completely agree with all your points. The knowledge that at worst I will lose the data on just 1 disk (or 2 if I fail during a rebuild) is very calming. If not for UnRaid there is no way I could manage the size of the media volume I maintain (from a time, energy, and money perspective). I mean if you know ZFS well and trust yourself then more power to you but UnRaid and friends fill a real gap.
    • esyir 5y ago
      The funny thing here is that I went with zfs lately because it saved me money. As a poor student trying to maximise gb/$, raid6/lk was the move balance point between capacity and redundancy.
  • atmosx 5y ago
    The learning curve of ZFS compared to every alternative out there is significantly lower IMO. The interface is easier and the guides online are great. There are drawbacks as the one discussed here, but as a Linux user who doesn’t want to mess up with the FS and uses ZFS for the backup server, the experience has been great so far.
• Dylan16807 5y ago
  > why anyone uses BTRFs (UnRaid or any other form of software raid that isn't ZFS) is still beyond me. BTRFS can do after-the-fact deduplication (with much better performance than ZFS dedup) and copy-on-write files. And you can turn snapshots into editable file systems.
  • eptcyka 5y ago
    I've had 3 catastrophic BTRFS failures. In two cases, the root filesystem just ran out of space and there was no way to repair the partition. Last time, the partition was just rendered unmountable after a reboot. All data was lost.No such thing has ever happened with ZFS for me.
    • Dylan16807 5y ago
      I've had some annoying failures too. But I wasn't listing pros and cons, I was explaining that there are some very notable features that ZFS lacks.
      • eptcyka 5y ago
        That's fair. However, when listing notable features for the sake of comparing software, I think it's important to also list other characteristics of a given piece of software. If we were to compare software by feature sets alone, one might argue that Windows has the most features, so Windows must be best OS.
    • tux1968 5y ago
      A recent Fedora install here came with a new default of BTRFS use rather than ext4. So i'm curious about your experience, were any of those catastrophic failures recent? Do you know of any patches entering the kernel that purport to fix the issues you experienced?
      • eptcyka 5y ago
        Last one was two years ago. I was told that it was a hardware issue. Same SSD is still going strong with ext4 now.
• the8472 5y ago
  btrfs does have some advantages over zfs - no data duplicated between page cache and arc - no upgrade problems on rolling distros - balance allows restructuring the array - offline dedup, no need for huge dedup tables - ability to turn off checksumming for specific files - O_DIRECT support - reflink copy - fiemap - easy to resize
  • baaym 5y ago
    And even included in the kernel
  • nix23 5y ago
    But the main thing of an fs is to preserve your files...btrfs can't even check the most important point.
    • the8472 5y ago
      The checksumming helps to spot faulty hardware, that's a step above most other filesystems and often smart info too.
      • akvadrako 5y ago
        Checksums don't help against bugs. You are much less likely to lose your whole disk with ext4 or ZFS than BTRFS.
    • edgyquant 5y ago
      I see this a lot but have never had problems with BTRFS and I’ve used it both on my larger disks (2+tb) and my root (250gb ssd) across multiple computers for the last four years.
  • chasil 5y ago
    - defragmentation
  • tomatocracy 5y ago
    Some of these are fair points but zfsonlinux/OpenZFS has had O_DIRECT since 0.8.x.
• imiric 5y ago
  Simplicity. There's a lot of complexity in ZFS I'd rather not depend on, and because it does so many things it's a big investment and liability to switch to. While I understand why it would be useful in a corporate setting, for personal use I've found the combination of LUKS+LVM+SnapRAID to work well and don't see the benefit of switching to ZFS. Two of those are core Linux features, and SnapRAID has been rock solid, though thankfully I haven't tested its recovery process, but it seems straightforward from the documentation. Sure I don't have the real-time error correction of ZFS and other fancy features, but most of those aren't requirements for a personal NAS.
  • j1elo 5y ago
    What about if you were just starting today, with 0 knowledge about basically anything related to storage and how to do it right? That's my case, I'm learning before setting up a cheap home lab and a NAS, and I'm wondering if biting into ZFS is just the best option that I have given today's ecosystem.
    • cogman10 5y ago
      I dove into ZFS for my home lab as a relative novice. It's not terrible, but there are a few new concepts to come to grips with. Once you have them down, it's not terrible. If you don't plan on raiding, IMO, ZFS is overkill. The check-summing is nice, but you can get that from other filesystems. Maintenance is fairly straight forward. I've even done a disk swap without too much fuss. The biggest issue I had was setting up raid z on root with ubuntu was a PITA (at the time at least, March of this year). I ended up switching over to debian instead. Once setup, things have been pretty smooth.
      • j1elo 5y ago
        Two things I like from it, as per what I've read so far: * Checksumming * As you mention, easy maintenance * Snapshots and how useful they are for backups In the end what I value is stuff that works reliably, doesn't get in the way, and requiring minimal supervision. And in the particular case of FS, I'd like to adopt a system that helps avoid bitrot in my data. Could you drop some names that you would consider as good alternatives of ZFS?
• mixedCase 5y ago
  I just put two 8TB drives into btrfs because it's a home server, I can't provision things up front. One day I may put a third 8TB drive and turn this RAID1 into RAID5. btrfs lets me do that, zfs doesn't, simple as. One day I may switch the whole thing to bcachefs, which I've donated and am looking forwards to. For the moment, btrfs will have to do. EDIT: downvoted by... the filesystem brigade?
  • nix23 5y ago
    >RAID5 I wish you lots of fun with that on btrfs :) Edit: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status RAID56 Unstable n/a write hole still exists > treated as if I'm storing business data or precious memories without backups, guess I'm just dumb No your not, but don't use unstable features in a filesystem
    • mixedCase 5y ago
      Well, that's the idea! This a low I/O media server where all the important stuff (<5G of photos) has 2+ redundancy, once remotely, and on every workstation I sync, with the rest of the data being able to crash and burn without much repercussion. The whole point of me using RAID1 (and maybe later RAID5) is that if a disk goes bust, odds are I can still watch a movie from it until I can get another disk. What's more, if I ever fill the RAID1 and I don't feel like breaking the piggy bank for another disk, I can go JBOD as far as my usecase is concerned. But hey, if the orange website tells me all servers are supposed to be treated as if I'm storing business data or precious memories without backups, guess I'm just dumb. On that note: donations welcome, each 8TB disk costs close to 500 USD here in Uruguay, so if anyone's first world opinion can buy me a couple so I can use the Right Filesystem™, I'd appreciate it!
      • michaelmrose 5y ago
        At 500 a disk you could fly a consultant out to demonstrate a high capacity storage solution consisting of many $200 disks who just happens to forget to bring the disks back!