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Comment by verroq | Hacker News Reader

The only thing preventing me from adopting zfs is that it is not being part of the linux kernel.

ZFS is so awesome that for my file server I pick the OS based on ZFS support, not the other way around.

Currently still running OpenSolaris on my ZFS server, probably will be FreeBSD next time I upgrade the hardware, but time will tell. Regardless of the OS, it will be ZFS!

OpenSolaris is dead, isn't it? Presumably you started when it was released/still alive, but hasn't it not had any security updates for years? Why not OpenIndiana/Other IllumOS variant?

Well yes, it's actually OpenIndiana.

Oh, OK. Thanks for clarifying.

Ditto, I run OpenIndiana but FreeBSD would be my next choice.

Can't live without boot environments on physical hardware.

ZFS was one of the reasons I switched to FreeBSD, and it turned out to have a lot of other advantages too. Might be worth a look?

When ZFS came out I tried OpenSolaris on a 48 disk machine. Regretted it immensely, that was the last sun hardware we bought

Simply it didn’t fit with the hundreds of other linux boxes we had.

We ended up scrapping the zfs idea and bout 1000+ disks (about 2PB) worth of linux storage over the next decade, on xfs and ext4.

Had Sun’s x4500 platform worked with a Debian based linux we’d have bought that instead of supermicro. Sun lost because of their choice to exclude zfs from linux.

From what I can tell, zfs is/was great, but wasn’t good enough to change our standard OS, and since then people moved to object storage

> When ZFS came out I tried OpenSolaris

Historical context: ZFS predates OpenSolaris by quite a few years, so the above statement can't be technically true.

Yes you’re correct it was normal Solaris 10, this was about 12 years ago. On my evaluation I was comparing with a satabeast and hp320s at the time, and I said that “zfs probably outweighs the problems of running Solaris”

The box was still in use in 2012, we were having issues and a “zfs upgrade” was suggested, but at that point we were adding new storage on linux.

I did the same, and no regrets. ZFS and FreeBSD are a great combination. Wish I'd made the move several years earlier.

Could you or someone else is why it's able to be part of the FreeBSD kernel but not the Linux kernel? I'm guessing this is a licensing and/or legal issue?

License compatibility. CDDL is a weak, file-based license similar to the MPL. It is generally (though not universally) believed to be incompatible with the GPL. (Which may or may not have been intentional. Again, accounts differ.) In any case, the Linux kernel along with Red Hat for its distributions won't incorporate ZFS code for this reason. The fact that it's Oracle that owns the copyright doubtless doesn't help.

FreeBSD is BSD licensed of course and that's considered compatible with CDDL given that CDDL is file-based.

Thanks ok yes that sounds familiar. For anyone else interested, this is a good read:

https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2016/linux-kernel-...

Too bad FreeBSD is a crappy operating system.

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