I mean you can’t maintain ZFS normally, and people have been trying to make zfs happen for what… two decades now?
zfs-dkms makes usage simple since openzfs backwards compatible down to 3.xx kernels. no need to mix match zfs with kernel versions anymore.
the only drawback is that you may not get to use the lastest kernel until openzfs mantainers give it the thumbs up (no 6.xx compatible release yet), but that's not "a bunch of extra effort".
and that's only a problem if you want to be in the bleeding edge. LTS kernel users wouldn't know about it.
> I’m not sure how ZFS could be “hugely successful” after two decades and still not in the Linux kernel.
"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" -Linus Torvalds
sound like a legal issue more than technical.
So its a technical issue too
The difference with ZFS is that the code is kernel-ready but there’s just some licensing worries (understandable ones) that stop it from being mainlined.
I’ve been running ZFS on Ubuntu Server for several years now and frankly ZFS is the only part of that entire system that doesn’t suck (in my opinion). I’d switch back to FreeBSD in a heartbeat if I didn’t need Docker support but credit where credit is due, Ubuntu’s ZFS support has been really good.
Edit: just to add, I’ve got nothing against anyone who does enjoy Ubuntu Server. It’s just not a Linux distro I personally have much fondness for.
When players like AWS provides ZFS as one of four alternatives in their "filesystem as a service"[1], I'd say we're beyond "trying to make zfs happen".
Not to mention the PB worth of data others[2] rely on ZFS to keep safe.
ZFS is growing incredibly quickly in popularity, and the only reason it's not the dominant filesystem already is because A) it took linux a long time to add support, and only dedicated appliance vendors had the will and ability to move to freebsd and B) macos was going to switch to zfs in the late '00s, but they got scared off by oracle's legal shenanigans, which seems to no longer be a relevant factor.
Linux has no support for ZFS. This is an out-of-tree patch set and therefor a no-go for most including myself.
ZFS intentionally has a terrible license and is owned by Oracle. People are free to do what they want but I wish all the time wasted on it could have been put in something more interesting.
Linux is unlike Eg freebsd not a monolithic operating system, but only a kernel so it is in my opinion not really right to say that it has no support.
The kernel has no native support for ZFS.
Ubuntu may ship with ZFS, but that's one distro. Meanwhile, RHEL etc won't even touch it.
On Linux, XFS dominates and likely will continue to dominate the server world, meanwhile btrfs will slowly erase ext4 in the desktop side of things. Android/Embedded have always used their own different filesystems so it's irrelevant there.
Neither does it have accelerated Nvidia card support that could be used for things like HPC/AI/ML. Yet I'm administrating an entire cluster of Ubuntu machines with cards just fine.
We generally use the "nvidia-driver-NNN-server" package.
If you want to live ideologically pure no one is going to stop you, but someone of us need to get work done.
ZFS is in a very weird position on Linux. It’s unfortunate but that’s mostly due to Sun and Oracle so I don’t feel bad stating people shouldn’t use it.
What defines a "serious distribution"?
Oracle owns most/all of the copyrights and Canonical was willing to take a calculated risk after, presumably, some back-channel discussions. But those companies with something to actually lose from a lawsuit with Oracle or organizations with strong free software principles aren't going anywhere close. Oracle has had a long time to change the license if they actually cared to.
Personally, I find it unfortunate that all the effort that has gone into ZFS as essentially a hobbyist copy-on-write filesystem didn't go into btrfs instead.
don't some BSDs and Linux share the same code base for ZFS?
Last I heard FreeBSD switched to ZfsOnLinux as upstream a few years ago before it was merged with OpenZFS.
IMO calling it a hobbyist fs is a bit unfair.
This is, in my opinion, the most important part. It's not some unhappy accident that there are significant legal issues with ZFS and GPL-licenced Linux - that is (allegedly) by design.
I know all those folks to greater or lesser degrees and Sun was a client of mine as an analyst. There were certainly a lot of conflicting motivations and concerns concerning Solaris and Linux.
The folks on FreeBSD didn't / don't seem to think so. Neither does Apple (who pulled in DTrace, which has the exact same license).
> and is owned by Oracle.
The OpenZFS folks would don't seem to think so.
The OpenZFS people are fully aware that Oracle owns ZFS, that's why they forked the last free copy and made OpenZFS. A small nitpick.