ZFS on Linux 0.8.1 Released | Hacker News Reader

ZFS on Linux 0.8.1 Released

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53 pointschungy36 comments

Is ZFS SIMD still hobbled by Linux kernel GPL fundamentalism/militancy (backported to LTS kernels, no less)?

Do you consider anyone with strong beliefs that run counter to your own fundamentalism/militancy?

Last I heard, the Linux Kernel was under the GPL and needs to comply with that. Is "follow a contract I opted into" fundamentalism/militancy?

I'm describing a retroactive change that has no technical justification, only political motivation. I have very liberal license preferences, but that move was beyond the pale: a big middle finger to a kernel module which is clearly not a derived work of the Linux kernel.

Engineering, technology, and science are deeply political, where politics isn't restricted to governments, parties, or official state systems. Refusal to recognize that doesn't change it.

The GPL is a licence that was created by people well-aware of the political significance, and it is the embodiment of certain political intentions in form of a licence. Projects that consciously use it can be expected to act upon those political intentions. Not understanding actions upon those political intentions is rather a sign of not understanding the situation.

It's certainly peculiar that the person driving efforts to cripple ZFS (which is, let us note, under an opensource license, albeit a GPL-hostile one) seems to be putting tremendous effort into doing it while being completely disinterested in, for example, the entirely proporietary graphics drivers from free software hostile companies such as NVidia.

Are you referring to this ZoL issue https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/8259 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ZFS-On-L... ?

Yep. "My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant." Why do we let emotional children like these have their petty tyrannies?

You can use FreeBSD, they are happy to provide their sources to proprietary projects. Linux uses different license and cares about projects that contribute back, nothing wrong with that.

I tried FreeBSD this week; it felt like a tool.

> You can use FreeBSD, they are happy to provide

I'd stop at that.

What's childish about it? They refactored their code and removed a legacy header in the process. If ZFS was a part of the kernel it would have been fixed as a part of the refactoring.

What's going on here is that people on the internet are asking Greg K-H to do extra work and his reply is that he doesn't care to.

If anything what is childish is random internet users thinking that they are entitled to Linux dev's time and work.

> What's going on here is that people on the internet are asking Greg K-H to do extra work and his reply is that he doesn't care to.

That really isn't "what's going on here." The "extra work" is changing one or two lines from containing EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL to EXPORT_SYMBOL and possibly moving them to a different place.

If you read through the email thread [1] linked in another comment, you'll see something completely different is being argued and discussed.

[1] https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=154689892914091&w=2

It's not linux fundamentalism here - it backdates to Sun who released ZFS under a license that appears to be deliberately designed to make it incompatible with the GPL

That was 2005 - 2019 ZoL is a true open-source project

According to their repo, it is still under CDDL, which is said license. That it is an open-source license doesn't mean it is compatible with GPL (if it is appears to still be a hotly debated topic, but the kernel devs have picked one stance)

Right, but it's still not GPL, it's CDDL, so it can't use GPL'd parts of the Kernel.

There are competing file systems on Linux which are more aligned with Linux goals and much better integrated with kernel. If ZFS won't work very well on Linux, it gives more chances for those alternative file systems (btrfs, bcachefs), so hopefully one day they'll be proper replacements and ZFS won't be needed at all. This is political thing indeed.

Anyway you can always patch the kernel. It won't be as easy to install, but e.g. Ubuntu should be able to do so.

So you're saying that Greg K-H is intentionally breaking ZFS in Linux so as to promote btrfs and bcachefs?

That's a big accusation.

Do you have any evidence?

I remember reading about BTRFS parity patches that were shelved because they didn't align with someone's business interests. Maybe a storage vendor is exerting some pressure to impede modern file systems on Linux.

As the other posters have pointed out - it's definitely an open source project with an open source license, but it's the CDDL. Same as it was in 05.

I love ZFS, use it on my server. It sucks that this has happened but AFAICT it's the result of a license choice made way back when, and it's still impacting things now.

oh - didn't know about the backport - considering the change in question is really just a few lines and more or less cosmetic it's a political move. This basically makes native ZFS encryption very slow on recent Linux kernels. Sad move.

It’s been pulled also from 4.19.38 (and beyond) as well as 4.14.120 (and beyond).

Lost a lot of respect for the Linux devs due to this story - this is just stupid fuckery due to hurt egos or whatever. Droping that API in 5.0+ fine - but backporting the removal of the non-GPL API in -stable kernels?

absolutely, at the point they backported an API breaking change to the LTS branch was the point they lost the benefit of the doubt

I believe some operating systems have patches to get around this problem? See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/61076 for example.

Wait, that got backported to LTS kernels?! No wonder my performance testing shows no difference!!!

Though I could have sworn the controversy was about __kernel_fpu becoming kernel_fpu - is there another set of git commits I need to find and rollback/reverse engineer on my 4.19 branch?

If a patch for zfs shows up in some random github repo that correctly teaches it to use the gpl-only symbols? I hope it makes it into your hands.

Does anyone know what the "real" reason is for not exporting the kernel function in 5.0+ anymore? Is there a technical reason, additional work or is it just a middle finger to ZFS devs?

The functions/symbols being used were __kernel_fpu_{begin,end}. These were designed for use within the kernel, and not for external modules - however external modules used them since there was no other alternative. At some point the kernel announced these were being deprecated, and have now been removed.

Since they weren't designed for external modules, someone submitted a patch to make them exportable. However the patch enforced EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL, so only modules that report being GPL licensed can use them.

Now ZFS is in a position where it can't use the original kernel symbols since they were removed, but can't use the new ones since they are marked as EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL.

https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=154689892914091&w=2

Just to finish off @keeperofdakeys comments: here is the ZFS answer:

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/commit/becdcec7b9cd6b8beaa...

Thanks for this explanation.

I was literally set to boot my ZoL project server for this first time since ~2010.

I used ZFS a lot when it was being integrated into macOS, then moved to OpenSolaris, then FreeBSD, but Linux was what I knew best.

So I'm trying to figure out the impact, if any, of recent Linux changes, for me to use to get my array back up.

Thanks to the kind folks putting in the effort and bringing this to linux, every release excites me! I've been a long long time fan of ZFS on BSD and Solaris (yes I'm old).

I wrote a script that installs zfs 0.8.1 on Ubuntu 19.04 at no work. Works for me and all pitfalls avoided

https://github.com/haraldrudell/zfs-0.8.1-on-ubuntu-19.04

That's like github haraldrudell zfs-0.8.1-on-ubuntu-19.04

What's notable in this release? Found it difficult to grasp from the detailed change log.

The versioning suggests that it's a patch release, e.g., bug fixes.

Probably the most notable thing is compatibility with the upcoming 5.2 kernel, otherwise just minor bugfixes.

0.8.0 came out just a few weeks ago and was a pretty huge release. It added encryption, TRIM support for SSDs, ability to remove disks from zpools, performance improvements, and more.

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/releases/tag/zfs-0.8.0

For me it's notable that the first drop doesn't contain any "oh shit" bugs, which would tend to suggest the more conservative amongst us should be thinking about upgrading the on-disk format from 0.7.x to 0.8.x.

Great work everyone!

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