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Comment by sippingabonedry | Hacker News Reader

So two filesystems that are essentially shunned from the Linux kernel and permanent second-class citizens, and one that was removed from Red Hat and has a questionable history of reliability. Oh boy which do I choose?

I'm saying ZFS on another OS.

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no thanks to red hat. i switched to debian for servers. fedora fortunately still supports btrfs.

zfs is shunned. can't really get around that copyright issue. bcachefs just hit a setback, which i am hopeful will eventually be resolved.

The copyright issue is not really that big, except from some devs who decided to sure Ubuntu :V

But there's a LOT of FUD about it.

it is big enough that it prevents distributions to include zfs. and that in reality is the problem. i would not care much if all distributions decided to ignore the copyright issue like canonical does and i could therefore get reliable support for zfs. but alone the thought of having to boot a rescue system to fix my broken computer and then not having zfs support because no one built a rescue system with it included is making the risk to high.

Distributions aren't locked from distributing ZFS, the only group that actually is suing is few kernel developers w/ their lawyers who have non-standard understanding of copyright (including one that isn't norm for the linux kernel, including for filesystems).

who is at fault doesn't really matter. the end result is that distributions aren't including it, and that kills it. unlike almost anything else which i can add to a system after booting it, filesystems need to be available from the start. until debian, fedora, suse, etc are convinced that there is no threat this just won't happen.

That's fair, yes.

I guess my specific "bubble" simply didn't have that issue for a long time

> zfs is shunned. can't really get around that copyright issue

Well except for Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distros supporting it.

There's also not a lot of money in Canonical for someone (Oracle) to sue for. Red Hat (now IBM/Red Hat) and I guess even SUSE is a different equation. Red Hat just wouldn't touch ZFS because of licensing.

Nevertheless, Ubuntu is one the most popular linux distributions. So “can’t be done” is obviously not true since it has been done.

One can say it is “dangerous” and they haven’t been sued “yet” but the deed is done already.

So use Ubuntu. Why do you care if other distros consider it too risky given different business positions/models?

> So use Ubuntu.

I am using Ubuntu!

> Why do you care if other distros consider it too risky given different business positions/models?

I don't know. Why do people comment on HN? :shrug:? It's fun and interesting to have a conversion?

I was mainly responding to a GP post that said "zfs is shunned. can't really get around that copyright issue". It didn't have a subject in there. As in "I can't really get around" or "anyone can't get around". And I read it as the second version and pointed that at least one distro did get around it.

> can't really get around that copyright issue.

Eh. Just wait until Oracle goes bankrupt due to their AI misinvestments & see where ZFS rights end up.

xfs/lvm-raid10 or ext4/lvm-raid10, obviously.

If I'm forced to use Linux, sure.

I could drop bricks on and cord pull those all day and they would not lose data. Which is a small ask for a filesystem IMO.

would want to have compression..

> would want to have compression..

I learned about VDO today. [0][1] I'd never heard of it before, but I'm using Gentoo Linux and both the dm-vdo kernel module and the 'vdo' software provided by [1] are distributed by Gentoo... so this isn't some weirdo Red Hat thing. It looks like you manage and used these just like any other thin-provisioned LVM volume [2], but -like I said- I've not used this before, and have only just skimmed the docs, so it's possible that I'm missing something important.

[0] <https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...>

[1] <https://github.com/dm-vdo/vdo>

[2] <https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...>

Yeah, I know that thing, but oddly they support only lz4 compression which is much weaker to zstd used everywhere else.

I don't see that as odd. It looks like it was released at about the same time that zstd was getting added to filesystems, and a little bit prior to when IBM acquired Red Hat. It's quite possible that IBM decided that "little" things like enhancing LVM aren't worth the money.

Its odd to me because it looks trivial to add another compression algorithm implementation

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