9 ms·

Both are imho linked to "offline desktop use cases are not important anymore". Both companies saw their future gains elsewhere, in internet-related functions an

Both are imho linked to "offline desktop use cases are not important anymore". Both companies saw their future gains elsewhere, in internet-related functions and what became known as "cloud". No need to have a fancy, featurefull and expensive filesystem when it is only to be used as a cache for remote cloud stuff.

wenc 1y ago
I remember eagerly anticipating ZFS for desktop hard disks. I seem to remember it never took off because memory requirements were too high and payoffs were insufficient to justify the trade off.
em500 1y ago
Linux or FreeBSD developers are free to adopt ZFS as their primary file systems. But it appears that practical benefits are not really evident to most users.
- thyristan 1y ago
  Lots of ZFS users are enthusiasts who heard about that one magic thing that does it all in one tidy box. Whereas usually you would have to known all the minutiae of LVM/mdadm/cryptsetup/nbd and mkfs.whatever to get to the same point. So while ZFS is the nicer-dicer of volume management and filesystems, the latter is your whole chef's knife set. And while you can dice with both, the user groups are not the same. And enthusiasts with the right usecases are very few. And for the thin-provisioned snapshotted subvolume usecase, btrfs is currently eating ZFS's lunch due to far better Linux integration. Think snapshots at every update, and having a/b boot to get back to a known-working config after an update. So widespread adoption through the distro route is out of the question.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    Ubuntu's ZFS-on-root with zsys auto snapshots have been working excellently on my server for 5 years. It automatically takes snapshots on every update and adds entries to grub so rolling back to the last good state is just a reboot away.
  - mustache_kimono 1y ago
    > And for the thin-provisioned snapshotted subvolume usecase, btrfs is currently eating ZFS's lunch due to far better Linux integration. Is this a technical argument? Or is this just more licensing nonsense? > Think snapshots at every update, and having a/b boot to get back to a known-working config after an update. I use ZFS and I have snapshots on every update? I have snapshots hourly, daily, weekly and monthly. I have triggered snapshots too, and ad hoc dynamic snapshots too. I wrote about it here: https://kimono-koans.github.io/opinionated-guide/ https://kimono-koans.github.io/opinionated-guide/
  - throw0101b 1y ago
    > Think snapshots at every update, and having a/b boot to get back to a known-working config after an update. Solaris had this about a decade ago with beadm: * https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53394_01/html/E54749/gpxnl.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53394_01/html/E54749/gpxnl.html FreeBSD has had it for several years as well. If Linux lacks it that is a failure of Linux (distros) not ZFS.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  That's called marketing. Give it a snazzy name, like say "TimeMachine" and users will jump on it. Also, ZFS has a bad name within the Linux community due to some licensing stuff. I find that most BSD users don't really care about such legalese and most people I know that run FreeBSD are running ZFS on root. Which works amazingly well I might add. Especially with something like sanoid added to it, it basically does the same as timemachine on mac, a feature that users love. Albeit stored on the same drive (but with syncoid or just manually rolled zfs send/recv scripts you can do that on another location too).
  - cherryteastain 1y ago
    > ZFS has a bad name within the Linux community due to some licensing stuff This is out of an abundance of caution. Canonical bundle ZFS in the Ubuntu kernel and no one sued them (yet).
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      True and I understand the caution considering Oracle is involved which are an awful company to do deal with (and their takeover of Sun was a disaster). But really, this is a concern for distros. Not for end users. Yet many of the Linux users I speak to are somehow worried about this. Most can't even describe the provisions of the GPL so I don't really know what that's about. Just something they picked up, I guess.
      - thyristan 1y ago
        Licensing concerns that prevent distros from using ZFS will sooner or later also have adverse effects on end users. Actually those effects are already there: The constant need to adapt a large patchset to the current kernel, meaning updates are a hassle. The lack of packaging in distributions, meaning updates are a hassle. And the lack of integration and related tooling, meaning many features can not be used (like a/b boots from snapshots after updates) easily, and installers won't know about ZFS so you have to install manually. None of this is a worry about being sued as an end user. But all of those are worries that you life will be harder with ZFS, and a lot harder as soon as the first lawsuits hit anyone, because all the current (small) efforts to keep it working will cease immediately.
- m4rtink 1y ago
  The ZFS license makes it impossible to include in upstream Linux kernel, which makes it much less usable as primary filesystem.
  - ryao 1y ago
    Linux’s signed off policy makes that impossible. Linus Torvalds would need Larry Elison’s signed off before even considering it. Linus told me this by email around 2013 (if I recall correctly) when I emailed him to discuss user requests for upstream inclusion. He had no concerns about the license being different at the time.
- Gud 1y ago
  ZFS is a first class citizen in FreeBSD and has been for at least a decade(probably longer). Not at all like in most Linux distros.
- toast0 1y ago
  ZFS on FreeBSD is quite nice. System tools like freebsd-update integrate well. UFS continues to work as well, and may be more appropriate for some use cases where ZFS isn't a good fit, copy on write is sometimes very expensive. Afaik, the FreeBSD position is both ZFS and UFS are fully supported and neither is secondary to the other; the installer asks what you want from ZFS, UFS, Manual (with a menu based tool), or Shell and you do whatever; in that order, so maybe a slight preferance towards ZFS.
- lotharcable 1y ago
  OpenZFS exists and there is a port of it for Mac OS X. The problem is that it is still owned by Oracle. And Solaris ZFS is incompatible with OpenZFS. Not that people really use Solaris anymore. It is really unfortunate. Linux has adopted file systems from other operating systems before. It is just nobody trust Oracle.
8fingerlouie 1y ago
Exactly this. The business case for providing a robust desktop filesystem simply doesn’t exist anymore. 20 years ago, (regular) people stored their data on computers and those needed to be dependable. Phones existed, but not to the extent they do today. Fast forward 20 years, and many people don’t even own a computer (in the traditional sense, many have consoles). People now have their entire life on their phones, backed up and/or stored in the cloud. SSDs also became “large enough” that HDDs are mostly a thing of the past in consumer computers. Instead you today have high reliability hardware and software in the cloud, which arguably is much more resilient than anything you could reasonably cook up at home. Besides the hardware (power, internet, fire suppression, physical security, etc), you’re also typically looking at multi geographical redundancy across multiple data centers using reed-Solomon erasure coding, but that’s nothing the ordinary user needs to know about. Most cloud services also offer some kind of snapshot functionality as malware protection (ie OneDrive offers unlimited snapshots for 30 days rolling). Truth is that most people are way better off just storing their data in the cloud and making a backup at home, though many people seem to ignore the latter, and Apple makes it exceptionally hard to automate.
- ryao 1y ago
  What do you do when you discover that some thing you have not touched in a long time, but suddenly need, is corrupted and all of your backups are corrupt because the corruption happened prior to your 30 day window at OneDrive? You would have early warning with ZFS. You have data loss with your plan.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
    You should have bought OneDrive Premium Plus with Extended Backup Storage (tm). This is your fault for not shelling out, stop blaming your computer. /s
- sho_hn 1y ago
  Workstation use cases exist. Data archival is not the only application of file systems.
- 1y ago
GeekyBear 1y ago
Internet connections of the day didn't yet offer enough speed for cloud storage. Apple was already working to integrate ZFS when Oracle bought Sun. From TFA: > ZFS was featured in the keynotes, it was on the developer disc handed out to attendees, and it was even mentioned on the Mac OS X Server website. Apple had been working on its port since 2006 and now it was functional enough to be put on full display. However, once Oracle bought Sun, the deal was off. Again from TFA: > The Apple-ZFS deal was brought for Larry Ellison's approval, the first-born child of the conquered land brought to be blessed by the new king. "I'll tell you about doing business with my best friend Steve Jobs," he apparently said, "I don't do business with my best friend Steve Jobs." And that was the end.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Was it not open source at that point?
  - ahl 1y ago
    It was! And Apple seemed fine with including DTrace under the CDDL. I’m not sure why Apple wanted some additional arrangement but they did.
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      The argument advanced in the piece isn't without merit -- that ripping out DTrace, if subsequent legal developments demanded it, would be a heck of a lot easier than removing a filesystem that would by then contain massive amounts of customer data. And given what a litigious jackass Larry Ellison / Oracle is, I can't fault Apple for being nervous.
      - mixmastamyk 1y ago
        Ironic since the post above tells the story as LE saying no to Jobs.
        1y ago

wenc 1y ago

I remember eagerly anticipating ZFS for desktop hard disks. I seem to remember it never took off because memory requirements were too high and payoffs were insufficient to justify the trade off.

em500 1y ago

Linux or FreeBSD developers are free to adopt ZFS as their primary file systems. But it appears that practical benefits are not really evident to most users.

thyristan 1y ago
Lots of ZFS users are enthusiasts who heard about that one magic thing that does it all in one tidy box. Whereas usually you would have to known all the minutiae of LVM/mdadm/cryptsetup/nbd and mkfs.whatever to get to the same point. So while ZFS is the nicer-dicer of volume management and filesystems, the latter is your whole chef's knife set. And while you can dice with both, the user groups are not the same. And enthusiasts with the right usecases are very few. And for the thin-provisioned snapshotted subvolume usecase, btrfs is currently eating ZFS's lunch due to far better Linux integration. Think snapshots at every update, and having a/b boot to get back to a known-working config after an update. So widespread adoption through the distro route is out of the question.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  Ubuntu's ZFS-on-root with zsys auto snapshots have been working excellently on my server for 5 years. It automatically takes snapshots on every update and adds entries to grub so rolling back to the last good state is just a reboot away.
- mustache_kimono 1y ago
  > And for the thin-provisioned snapshotted subvolume usecase, btrfs is currently eating ZFS's lunch due to far better Linux integration. Is this a technical argument? Or is this just more licensing nonsense? > Think snapshots at every update, and having a/b boot to get back to a known-working config after an update. I use ZFS and I have snapshots on every update? I have snapshots hourly, daily, weekly and monthly. I have triggered snapshots too, and ad hoc dynamic snapshots too. I wrote about it here: https://kimono-koans.github.io/opinionated-guide/ https://kimono-koans.github.io/opinionated-guide/
- throw0101b 1y ago
  > Think snapshots at every update, and having a/b boot to get back to a known-working config after an update. Solaris had this about a decade ago with beadm: * https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53394_01/html/E54749/gpxnl.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53394_01/html/E54749/gpxnl.html FreeBSD has had it for several years as well. If Linux lacks it that is a failure of Linux (distros) not ZFS.
wkat4242 1y ago
That's called marketing. Give it a snazzy name, like say "TimeMachine" and users will jump on it. Also, ZFS has a bad name within the Linux community due to some licensing stuff. I find that most BSD users don't really care about such legalese and most people I know that run FreeBSD are running ZFS on root. Which works amazingly well I might add. Especially with something like sanoid added to it, it basically does the same as timemachine on mac, a feature that users love. Albeit stored on the same drive (but with syncoid or just manually rolled zfs send/recv scripts you can do that on another location too).
- cherryteastain 1y ago
  > ZFS has a bad name within the Linux community due to some licensing stuff This is out of an abundance of caution. Canonical bundle ZFS in the Ubuntu kernel and no one sued them (yet).
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    True and I understand the caution considering Oracle is involved which are an awful company to do deal with (and their takeover of Sun was a disaster). But really, this is a concern for distros. Not for end users. Yet many of the Linux users I speak to are somehow worried about this. Most can't even describe the provisions of the GPL so I don't really know what that's about. Just something they picked up, I guess.
    - thyristan 1y ago
      Licensing concerns that prevent distros from using ZFS will sooner or later also have adverse effects on end users. Actually those effects are already there: The constant need to adapt a large patchset to the current kernel, meaning updates are a hassle. The lack of packaging in distributions, meaning updates are a hassle. And the lack of integration and related tooling, meaning many features can not be used (like a/b boots from snapshots after updates) easily, and installers won't know about ZFS so you have to install manually. None of this is a worry about being sued as an end user. But all of those are worries that you life will be harder with ZFS, and a lot harder as soon as the first lawsuits hit anyone, because all the current (small) efforts to keep it working will cease immediately.
m4rtink 1y ago
The ZFS license makes it impossible to include in upstream Linux kernel, which makes it much less usable as primary filesystem.
- ryao 1y ago
  Linux’s signed off policy makes that impossible. Linus Torvalds would need Larry Elison’s signed off before even considering it. Linus told me this by email around 2013 (if I recall correctly) when I emailed him to discuss user requests for upstream inclusion. He had no concerns about the license being different at the time.
Gud 1y ago
ZFS is a first class citizen in FreeBSD and has been for at least a decade(probably longer). Not at all like in most Linux distros.
toast0 1y ago
ZFS on FreeBSD is quite nice. System tools like freebsd-update integrate well. UFS continues to work as well, and may be more appropriate for some use cases where ZFS isn't a good fit, copy on write is sometimes very expensive. Afaik, the FreeBSD position is both ZFS and UFS are fully supported and neither is secondary to the other; the installer asks what you want from ZFS, UFS, Manual (with a menu based tool), or Shell and you do whatever; in that order, so maybe a slight preferance towards ZFS.
lotharcable 1y ago
OpenZFS exists and there is a port of it for Mac OS X. The problem is that it is still owned by Oracle. And Solaris ZFS is incompatible with OpenZFS. Not that people really use Solaris anymore. It is really unfortunate. Linux has adopted file systems from other operating systems before. It is just nobody trust Oracle.

8fingerlouie 1y ago

Exactly this. The business case for providing a robust desktop filesystem simply doesn’t exist anymore. 20 years ago, (regular) people stored their data on computers and those needed to be dependable. Phones existed, but not to the extent they do today. Fast forward 20 years, and many people don’t even own a computer (in the traditional sense, many have consoles). People now have their entire life on their phones, backed up and/or stored in the cloud. SSDs also became “large enough” that HDDs are mostly a thing of the past in consumer computers. Instead you today have high reliability hardware and software in the cloud, which arguably is much more resilient than anything you could reasonably cook up at home. Besides the hardware (power, internet, fire suppression, physical security, etc), you’re also typically looking at multi geographical redundancy across multiple data centers using reed-Solomon erasure coding, but that’s nothing the ordinary user needs to know about. Most cloud services also offer some kind of snapshot functionality as malware protection (ie OneDrive offers unlimited snapshots for 30 days rolling). Truth is that most people are way better off just storing their data in the cloud and making a backup at home, though many people seem to ignore the latter, and Apple makes it exceptionally hard to automate.

ryao 1y ago
What do you do when you discover that some thing you have not touched in a long time, but suddenly need, is corrupted and all of your backups are corrupt because the corruption happened prior to your 30 day window at OneDrive? You would have early warning with ZFS. You have data loss with your plan.
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
  You should have bought OneDrive Premium Plus with Extended Backup Storage (tm). This is your fault for not shelling out, stop blaming your computer. /s
sho_hn 1y ago
Workstation use cases exist. Data archival is not the only application of file systems.
1y ago

GeekyBear 1y ago

Internet connections of the day didn't yet offer enough speed for cloud storage. Apple was already working to integrate ZFS when Oracle bought Sun. From TFA: > ZFS was featured in the keynotes, it was on the developer disc handed out to attendees, and it was even mentioned on the Mac OS X Server website. Apple had been working on its port since 2006 and now it was functional enough to be put on full display. However, once Oracle bought Sun, the deal was off. Again from TFA: > The Apple-ZFS deal was brought for Larry Ellison's approval, the first-born child of the conquered land brought to be blessed by the new king. "I'll tell you about doing business with my best friend Steve Jobs," he apparently said, "I don't do business with my best friend Steve Jobs." And that was the end.

mixmastamyk 1y ago
Was it not open source at that point?
- ahl 1y ago
  It was! And Apple seemed fine with including DTrace under the CDDL. I’m not sure why Apple wanted some additional arrangement but they did.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    The argument advanced in the piece isn't without merit -- that ripping out DTrace, if subsequent legal developments demanded it, would be a heck of a lot easier than removing a filesystem that would by then contain massive amounts of customer data. And given what a litigious jackass Larry Ellison / Oracle is, I can't fault Apple for being nervous.
    - mixmastamyk 1y ago
      Ironic since the post above tells the story as LE saying no to Jobs.
      - 1y ago