Linus: Don't Use ZFS(realworldtech.com)
realworldtech.com
Linus: Don't Use ZFS
https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=189711&curpostid=189841
555 comments
I'll give up Linux on my servers before I give up ZFS
especially so given the recent petulant attitude that broke API compatibility in the LTS branch just to spite the ZFS developers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186458
compete honestly on technical merit, rather than pulling dirty tricks that you'd expect of Oracle or 1990's MS
especially so given the recent petulant attitude that broke API compatibility in the LTS branch just to spite the ZFS developers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186458
compete honestly on technical merit, rather than pulling dirty tricks that you'd expect of Oracle or 1990's MS
As a heavy user of ZFS and Linux, what else is there that even comes close to what ZFS offers?
I want cheap and reliable snapshots, export & import of file systems like ZFS datasets, simple compression, caching facilities(like SLOG and ARC) and decent performance.
I want cheap and reliable snapshots, export & import of file systems like ZFS datasets, simple compression, caching facilities(like SLOG and ARC) and decent performance.
"Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me." - Linus
I have a strong feeling Linus has never actually used ZFS.
I have a strong feeling Linus has never actually used ZFS.
He's not wrong. ext4 is actually maintained. This matters. ZFS hasn't kept up with SSDs. ZFS partitions are also almost impossible to resize, which is a huge deal in today's world of virtualized hardware.
Honestly Linus's attitude is refreshing. It's a sign that Linux hasn't yet become some stiff design-by-committee thing. One guy ranting still calls the shots. I love it. Protect this man at all costs.
Honestly Linus's attitude is refreshing. It's a sign that Linux hasn't yet become some stiff design-by-committee thing. One guy ranting still calls the shots. I love it. Protect this man at all costs.
I don't blame Linus, but I use ZFS a lot.
I'll drop ZFS the moment I have an alternative with the same features:
- disk management with simple commands that can create raids in any modern configuration
- zero cost snapshots
- import/export (zfs send/recv)
- COW and other data integrity niceties
- compression, encryption, dedup, checksums
I am very grateful to the OpenZFS community, and I think they deserve praises for their work. Saying the code is not maintained is quite unfair.
I'll drop ZFS the moment I have an alternative with the same features:
- disk management with simple commands that can create raids in any modern configuration
- zero cost snapshots
- import/export (zfs send/recv)
- COW and other data integrity niceties
- compression, encryption, dedup, checksums
I am very grateful to the OpenZFS community, and I think they deserve praises for their work. Saying the code is not maintained is quite unfair.
He mentioned that he didn’t think it was being maintained. It’s more or less been formed no?
Has Linus not seen the work that the OpenZFS folks are doing?
ZFS is amazing and I would soon go to a BSD flavor with a fun set of user land utilities than give it up.
Has Linus not seen the work that the OpenZFS folks are doing?
ZFS is amazing and I would soon go to a BSD flavor with a fun set of user land utilities than give it up.
Remember kids: Oracle has no customers, only hostages!
Switching to FreeBSD now for my storage.
Having a 8TB database setup. Primary DB is running with LVM(cache)/XFS, which gives very satisfying speed, but I really love my secondary mirror DB which storage is on ZFS. I do daily snapshots and daily incremental backups via send/rcv to another ZFS location. No other FS I am aware of provides me with this and that easy functionality.
Linus seems to never used ZFS. Although I can understand his issues with the licensing, he is ranting about ZFS. That's a shame.
Alright, Linus, I'll make you a deal: I'll consider dropping ZFS when you ship a production-grade BTRFS (or reiserfs or anything else with the same features).
Do you know that FreeBSD is actually a usable modern OS these days? ;) I run a FreeBSD desktop with Nvidia drivers without any issues. OpenJDK works great, among other things. And it supports ZFS natively, and root on ZFS is the default installation option.
ZFS functionality dwarfs the minor issues Linus has with it in my opinion. I find it to be well maintained, and not just bug fixes but new features keep being added as well. If I couldn't use ZFS on linux anymore, I wouldn't hesitate to setup another system just so I could keep using ZFS.
Probably should add Java to that list. The sooner Oracle stops existing, the better.
"Oracle's litigious nature". What a beautifully short and concise phrase. I immediately had to write this down and stash it as an argument for the next time someone at work pushes to go for "Oracle $product" after having received a bottle of wine from their sales team.
Honestly, at this point if I can't get ZFS in Linux I would move to FreeBSD whenever I need big filesystem. How does Linux® Binary Compatibility layer work on FreeBSD?
Linus is correct in his arguments. As the lead for the linux project, he shouldn't merge things that he feels isn't up to stuff from a license point of view.
That's why we have different software.
If you asked Theo to merge an encryption algorithm for example into OpenSSH and OpenBSD - he's going to have an opinion about it - and that's his thing.
Why would this be controversial at all?
That's why we have different software.
If you asked Theo to merge an encryption algorithm for example into OpenSSH and OpenBSD - he's going to have an opinion about it - and that's his thing.
Why would this be controversial at all?
It's too bad. ZFS is amazing and so ridiculously simple to use and manage if you can find the recent docs among all the old docs online.
Anyone using Stratis? Just noticed it recently went to 2.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratis_(configuration_daemon) Curious to know how it handles device failures, removals, additions and so on.
Anyone using Stratis? Just noticed it recently went to 2.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratis_(configuration_daemon) Curious to know how it handles device failures, removals, additions and so on.
Polite reminder that Kent Overstreet is still plugging away at a new copy-on-write FS for Linux called bcachefs. One day, I hope it'll replace ZFS for my uses.
I'm not involved with the project in any way, apart from sending him a few bucks a month on patreon. It's literally the only open source thing I sponsor; it seems like a really worthwhile effort especially considering Linus' advice here...
I'm not involved with the project in any way, apart from sending him a few bucks a month on patreon. It's literally the only open source thing I sponsor; it seems like a really worthwhile effort especially considering Linus' advice here...
Perhaps if one wanted to use ZFS they should just use a kernel that supports it?
ZFS is certainly "nice to have" on desktop, but the main use case is going to be servers and NAS. You can use BSD there, it won't bite.
ZFS is certainly "nice to have" on desktop, but the main use case is going to be servers and NAS. You can use BSD there, it won't bite.
Or do use ZFS, just know that Oracle sucks and you have to go through hoops because of it...
Also, while ZFS for me has been performant, that seems like a silly reason to decide to use it or not use it. I think ZFS pools and snapshots would be among the deciding factors to use it or not.
FWIW, as some other commenters have said, I'd rather drop Linux than drop ZFS. I'm actually only even running Linux on my home server right now because I decided to try Proxmox out on it months ago and it was soooo obscenely easy to install I haven't bothered to reset it yet (though I need to for various reasons; Proxmox itself being the first, ha).
Really all I care about for my host OS these days is the ability to do virtualization and GPU pass-through... Linux is an option but not the only one. Having a robust storage system where drives can fail, exist as one logical drive, are replicated, has snapshots (including RAM), and I literally don't have to worry about it-- that though, that's really only available with ZFS.
Also, while ZFS for me has been performant, that seems like a silly reason to decide to use it or not use it. I think ZFS pools and snapshots would be among the deciding factors to use it or not.
FWIW, as some other commenters have said, I'd rather drop Linux than drop ZFS. I'm actually only even running Linux on my home server right now because I decided to try Proxmox out on it months ago and it was soooo obscenely easy to install I haven't bothered to reset it yet (though I need to for various reasons; Proxmox itself being the first, ha).
Really all I care about for my host OS these days is the ability to do virtualization and GPU pass-through... Linux is an option but not the only one. Having a robust storage system where drives can fail, exist as one logical drive, are replicated, has snapshots (including RAM), and I literally don't have to worry about it-- that though, that's really only available with ZFS.
Yet another user testimony: For simple volumes and snapshots at home I switched from ZFS to BTRFS because ZFS on Fedora was giving me too many issues. It simply wasn't integrated well enough into the system. Had nothing to do with the ZFS FS implementation, merely the packaging.
Either way, BTRFS works for everything I need it to do and it's native.
Either way, BTRFS works for everything I need it to do and it's native.
More technical version of the same discussion here: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAB9dFdsZb-sZixeOzrt8F50h1pnUK2...
Typical Linus bullshit ...
"Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me."
Yeah, just use XFS or EXT4 without ANY data consistency ... you can use FAT32 also, similar level filesystem.
"Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me."
Yeah, just use XFS or EXT4 without ANY data consistency ... you can use FAT32 also, similar level filesystem.
Until I have a viable alternative that gives me snapshotting (so I can make consistent backups), that advice is worthless to me.
Maybe offtopic, but I'm impressed by the rest of the conversation that generated that message from Linus: there is a whole thread in which Linus gets to explain with detail various locking mechanism in the kernel, pros and cons, etc.
I think we don't see this normally happening; situations in which the (technical) responsible for the Apple or MS kernels get to answer question and explain with such level of detail.
I think also that is even more interesting than the original blog post that originated that thread. Someone should harvest all these Linus comments and order them in some kind of "lectures" library.
I think we don't see this normally happening; situations in which the (technical) responsible for the Apple or MS kernels get to answer question and explain with such level of detail.
I think also that is even more interesting than the original blog post that originated that thread. Someone should harvest all these Linus comments and order them in some kind of "lectures" library.
His reasons may not be perfect but he's right.
If you use a filesystem that isn't mainline and it breaks it's all on you to figure it out and fix it. Having used experimental filesystems before and been burned I would rather stick with what I know and won't change overnight.
I'll keep an eye open for new filesystems of course but if it's not mainline unless it's for personal hacking no.
> I own several SBC's (Small Board Computer) that do not run mainline kernels. The company that makes them provides their own patched kernel so if it breaks I'm up creek but I know who to bitch at.
If you use a filesystem that isn't mainline and it breaks it's all on you to figure it out and fix it. Having used experimental filesystems before and been burned I would rather stick with what I know and won't change overnight.
I'll keep an eye open for new filesystems of course but if it's not mainline unless it's for personal hacking no.
> I own several SBC's (Small Board Computer) that do not run mainline kernels. The company that makes them provides their own patched kernel so if it breaks I'm up creek but I know who to bitch at.
I kind of wish somebody with money took Oracle into court on ZFS and established it doesn't have Oracle taint, so we can move on. Java would be good too but that fight went to the wrong point of law to argue. Opensolaris .. I feel meh about but perhaps it too needs this.
Money doesn't solve all problems, but money can solve legal problems c/f the lawsuits people like newegg do, to get rid of the IPR leeches. (And cloudflare?)
Money doesn't solve all problems, but money can solve legal problems c/f the lawsuits people like newegg do, to get rid of the IPR leeches. (And cloudflare?)
So what would be a viable ZFS alternative on a Linux based NAS I'm planning to build in a few months?
I'm currently running Nas4Free on a giant rack sized thing I built using a Mini-ITX Atom board years ago, and ZFS works like a charm, but I also intend to move some day to the ARM architecture which unfortunately the *BSD based NAS software doesnt support (yet).
I'm tempted by this smaller hardware in particular: https://wiki.kobol.io/helios64/intro/
So far the only viable option would be Openmediavault which supports ZFS only through external modules which I'd be not entirely comfortable with. I'd only arrange disks as RAID1 pairs however.
Are there any lawyers that can verify the legal claims made? Anyone can file a lawsuit at anytime for whatever reason, that doesn't mean the lawsuit is valid. Sure using ZFS on your home system or even a small implementation is not a big deal but if there's a company with money lawsuits happen.
I would think the wide availability and usage of ZFS and the fact that this is no longer 20 years ago when companies would sue as if they were 19th century tycoons there must be some sort of "well you let ZFS be used this long without suing you can't just let it be open for so long and then sue when it is profitable" sort of statue in American law. Again I'm not a lawyer and I know enough about law to know I do not know enough about law.
I would think the wide availability and usage of ZFS and the fact that this is no longer 20 years ago when companies would sue as if they were 19th century tycoons there must be some sort of "well you let ZFS be used this long without suing you can't just let it be open for so long and then sue when it is profitable" sort of statue in American law. Again I'm not a lawyer and I know enough about law to know I do not know enough about law.
Don't go too far people. Linus's criticism against ZFS is concise: buzzword & licensing.
Here, Linus is putting emphasis on license, not technical whatever details of ZFS. He clearly doesn't use ZFS and is not even interested in the problem ZFS solves. He is only "interested" is his (and community's) control over the ZFS source code.
So, his logic basically becomes this:
ZFS is not mainline-able, so veto it until Oracle changes its attitude - a simple old FOSS infestation tactic.
So, please, move on, people. The discussion is not even about file system...
Here, Linus is putting emphasis on license, not technical whatever details of ZFS. He clearly doesn't use ZFS and is not even interested in the problem ZFS solves. He is only "interested" is his (and community's) control over the ZFS source code.
So, his logic basically becomes this:
ZFS is not mainline-able, so veto it until Oracle changes its attitude - a simple old FOSS infestation tactic.
So, please, move on, people. The discussion is not even about file system...
"honestly, there is no way I can merge any of the ZFS efforts until I get an official letter from Oracle that is signed by their main legal counsel or preferably by Larry Ellison himself that says that yes, it's ok to do so and treat the end result as GPL'd.
Other people think it can be ok to merge ZFS code into the kernel and that the module interface makes it ok, and that's their decision. But considering Oracle's litigious nature, and the questions over licensing, there's no way I can feel safe in ever doing so.
And I'm not at all interested in some "ZFS shim layer" thing either that some people seem to think would isolate the two projects. That adds no value to our side, and given Oracle's interface copyright suits (see Java), I don't think it's any real licensing win either."