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Sun had certain values as a company it enforced through its corporate culture which made ZFS excellent. My perception is that the ZoL based fork had a lot more

Sun had certain values as a company it enforced through its corporate culture which made ZFS excellent. My perception is that the ZoL based fork had a lot more instability and bugs compared to the parallel development of ZFS by in the Open Source Solaris world. That OpenZFS is based on the more unreliable code base should be evidence that the values which made ZFS excellent under Suns steermanship are insufficiently maintained and that features integrated into ZFS after the fork who did come from the ZoL side should not be used if one wants the reliability of ZFS. The fact that not all metadata is encrypted shows they are doing things wrong from a principled standpoint. Sun didn't halfbake important stuff like that. The ZoL community will in the long run make the reliability of OpenZFS converge against the reliability of BTRFS because that is the level of reliability open source allows for. Initially higher stability be dammed.

mgerdts 4y ago
Many of the open source zfs developers are the same ones that developed zfs at Sun and then Oracle. I worked on the Solaris team from 2010 until 2017 and have contributed to open source zfs implantations in illumos and openzfs. Your criticisms seem ill-informed based on my actual experience in my contributions to these multiple zfs code bases. I actually found a fair number of improvements in the testing in ZoL. With Solaris zfs, you saw features after they were exercised by up to a few hundred engineers for months to years. Now you are getting bits fresh from the factory. Like when software is developed behind closed doors, bugs happen and they are progressively squashed leading to a more stable product.
mgerdts 4y ago
> The fact that not all metadata is encrypted This was one of my concerns when I first encountered this trade off in Solaris zfs. That is, you claim that the Solaris zfs encryption is better in this regard but it’s not.
- mustache_kimono 4y ago
  What metadata is not encrypted? I thought it was only dataset names and their properties, which kind of makes sense?
  - mgerdts 4y ago
    Everything outside of encrypted datasets’ data is not encrypted. This includes the things you mention as well as vdev labels, block pointers, etc. The clear text bits can tell you a fair amount about the relative age of written data and how much data is present. It will also identify which machine last imported the pool.
panick21_ 4y ago
> Sun didn't halfbake important stuff like that That is disprove by the fact that original Sun encryption did the same thing and the one currently in Oracle ZFS does so too.
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mgerdts 4y ago

Many of the open source zfs developers are the same ones that developed zfs at Sun and then Oracle. I worked on the Solaris team from 2010 until 2017 and have contributed to open source zfs implantations in illumos and openzfs. Your criticisms seem ill-informed based on my actual experience in my contributions to these multiple zfs code bases. I actually found a fair number of improvements in the testing in ZoL. With Solaris zfs, you saw features after they were exercised by up to a few hundred engineers for months to years. Now you are getting bits fresh from the factory. Like when software is developed behind closed doors, bugs happen and they are progressively squashed leading to a more stable product.

mgerdts 4y ago

> The fact that not all metadata is encrypted This was one of my concerns when I first encountered this trade off in Solaris zfs. That is, you claim that the Solaris zfs encryption is better in this regard but it’s not.

mustache_kimono 4y ago
What metadata is not encrypted? I thought it was only dataset names and their properties, which kind of makes sense?
- mgerdts 4y ago
  Everything outside of encrypted datasets’ data is not encrypted. This includes the things you mention as well as vdev labels, block pointers, etc. The clear text bits can tell you a fair amount about the relative age of written data and how much data is present. It will also identify which machine last imported the pool.

panick21_ 4y ago

> Sun didn't halfbake important stuff like that That is disprove by the fact that original Sun encryption did the same thing and the one currently in Oracle ZFS does so too.

deleted 4y ago

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