Linus Torvalds Doesn't Recommend Using ZFS On Linux

[k1e0x]

http://lwn.net/1999/0211/a/lt-binary.html

Drop that arguement. Linus has never agreed with vendors linking proprietary drivers into the Linux kernel. if a update to the Linux kernel breaks a binary driver Linus does not care at all. ZFS out of tree is in the same location.

Horseshit..

If a kernel changed caused nvidia to lose 2% of it's fps the Linux community would be on high alert to fix it.

You have no problem giving a proprietary company a total pass while shafting a open source project.. hypocrites. Lets be frank here.. you really don't care about licenses at all.. You care that 20 years ago a now dead company said bad things about holy Linux and the GPL.

The other thing is nobody has solved my use case.

I use macOS, FreeBSD and Linux.
I use removable drives from time to time to store data. (long term cold storage)
I'd like to access that disk from any of the OS's I use.
Those drives need to be encrypted.

What file system would you recommend for me? I use ZFS currently for this.

The best answer I got is.. "Lol just use Linux nub" .. real great.. thanks.

[oiaohm]

Oh.. so you mean I have to release the code under both licenses exactly the same way. That is odd.. I thought the terms were "completely different"?

Not the same. I could have my total product under some support license say there is a Linux kernel under GPL in here and here the source like Microsoft does with WSL2.

Worst case with CDDL depend on country law your complete product if it software could have to be under CDDL. So you can guess how Microsoft would react to attempt to so a solaris equal to WSL2 and saw that. Being license intolerant beast is way worse.

CDDL has not forced you to release your source code to customer but can also locked the license you can ship your product under due to its anti other licenses nature it got from MPL 1.1. This is a true nightmare for those attempting to make products.

Remember SUN was a hardware maker so screwing over those making software was fine.

Changing code for software was not a minor change legally when sun made CDDL from MPL 1.1. It altered the scope of coverage a lot.

CDDL is not a MPL 2.0 or LGPL. CDDL more viral than LGPL or MPL 2.0.

I am not talking about release code problem with CDDL. GPL that a minor problem to release the source code.

CDDL problem is that you could find that the way you want to license the application that you have used a bit of CDDL is not possible by any means due to the word software used all over CDDL license..

GPL you can always argue non derivative work that in the GPL license as GPL says it only applies to derivative work.

That is not in the CDDL license. You have the larger work vs original software in the CDDL license. This basically leave it to what ever court to decide where the legal line is with CDDL.

means a work that combines Covered Software with other material, in a separate file or files, that is not Covered Software.
Above is larger works define in MPL 2.0.

means a work which combines Covered Code or portions thereof with code not governed by the terms of this License.
Above is larger works define in MPL 1.1

You may create a Larger Work by combining Covered Software with other code not governed by the terms of this License and distribute the Larger Work as a single product. In such a case, You must make sure the requirements of this License are fulfilled for the Covered Software.
This is the longer CDDL define larger works.

MPL 1.1 is vague but its not ordering you do anything. MPL 2.0 gives the courts some direction what is and what is not that under MPL 2.0 you should keep different licensed stuff in different files..

CDDL define Larger works is directly instruction to obey the CDDL for covered software on the Larger work. This is what brings your possible count problem. If your license over your product that is a Larger work does not contain all the terms of CDDL have you disobeyed the instruction in the license "You must make sure the requirements of this License are fulfilled for the Covered Software"

Once a license starts giving you orders that you must do things you want those things not to be vague.

[k1e0x]

oiaohm

Off chance.. what is your opinion of Sun? Do you like their hardware? Have you ever used a Sun product? Just curious..

To your... post. The only code that needs to be licensed CDDL is code that was already CDDL. Very viral. (same with GPL)

[oiaohm]

If a kernel changed caused nvidia to lose 2% of it's fps the Linux community would be on high alert to fix it.

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/936310/linux/nvidia-drivers-do-not-install-with-kernel-4-6/

It happens quite a bit where a Linux kernel version change results in Nvidia binary drivers losing 100 percent of their performance. The Linux kernel does not fix it Nvidia has to modify their driver to work.

2% fps performance loss or more happens almost every second Linux kernel release. Nvidia working very hard fixing stuff as upstream Linux kernel modifies stuff and does not care at all.

I use macOS, FreeBSD and Linux.
I use removable drives from time to time to store data. (long term cold storage)
I'd like to access that disk from any of the OS's I use.
Those drives need to be encrypted.

What file system would you recommend for me? I use ZFS currently for this.

Now we get to the true point you are pushing for ZFS in Linux attempt to ignore the fact the license of ZFS is total crap with lot of badly vague points.

The combination Mac OS , FreeBSD and Linux really there is not a good file system choice there.

Normally I would be going cluster network file systems. The fun that a raspberry pi 4 plugged in by charge usb is in fact a network card. This way I only have 1 operating system in fact writing the data down to disc. Get me out of different bugs in mac OS , Freebsd and Linux drivers for writing the data. Yes raspberry pi 4 can be pretending to be a USB stick with like fat32/exfat on it with the data stored on the disc 100 percent encrypted by the raspberry pi 4.

I also have small NAS boxes based off other arm boards.

I have a few different ways of skinning this problem without going near zfs.

Please note I am not limited to file system either. I can use like MTP you know the protocol you use to write into your android devices to write to any file system Linux on the raspberry pi supports from Windows , Mac OS and freebsd.

"Lol just use Linux nub"<< Maybe this was the right answer. You most likely were not thinking you could be a little arm based Linux between the harddrive and the operating systems and do some really creative translations.

[oiaohm]

[USER="105978"]Off chance.. what is your opinion of Sun? Do you like their hardware? Have you ever used a Sun product? Just curious..

Some of the sun cubish shaped servers were really nice until you had to rebuild them. Getting all the ducting plates back in the right place for airflow in them was a serous pain in the ass. So yes I have used SUN hardware back in the day. Mostly end up x86 stuff because it was cheaper.

To your... post. The only code that needs to be licensed CDDL is code that was already CDDL. Very viral. (same with GPL)

No the define of larger works in CDDL has not been tested in court. The way that could larger works in CDDL could read in may be more viral than GPL as in the large work could be required to be CDDL. Where GPL it would be non derivative in almost all cases.

CDDL is basically a flawed license question if intentional. CDDL is not a good license no matter how you look at it. GPL you might hate but you can legally work out where you stand with prior case histories to support your beliefs. CDDL has a lot of horrible vague that will be left to the courts to decide.

[Tuxie]

I use macOS, FreeBSD and Linux.
I use removable drives from time to time to store data. (long term cold storage)
I'd like to access that disk from any of the OS's I use.
Those drives need to be encrypted.

What file system would you recommend for me? I use ZFS currently for this.

I'd say exfat + gocryptfs or securefs. That way you can also easily backup, sync or move the encrypted data (the underlying files) to different media using your standard tools. Both are available for Linux, macOS (brew install gocryptfs/securefs) and Windows (use cppcryptfs for gocryptfs).

[OneTimeShot]

Wow - lots of people who can't use Google.

Here's what Oracle said about ZFS http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic....10810152617279

"Certainly, we (at Sun) feel like we have put some serious coin into developing things like ZFS and dtrace, which we have published under a FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software) license (CDDL for now), and for which we have applied for patents. We will *never* (yes, I said *never*) sue anyone who uses our ZFS codebase and follows the terms of the license: they publish their improvements, propagate the license, and not sue anyone else who uses the ZFS codebase. And look at the innovation not only with ZFS in OpenSolaris, but its adoption by Mac OS X and BSD.

But under what conditions would we enforce our patents? How would we feel if someone did a cleanroom version of ZFS and kept the resulting code proprietary?

We wouldn't feel good, to be sure. But I'd put the burden back on us (certainly as a large company) that if such a thing were to happen it was because we were failing to *continue to* innovate around our original code. Being sanguine about patent protection as an exclusive right would result in less innovation, not more.

Note the use of "CDDL for now" and the list of Operating Systems they provide (when asked to comment by a Linux focussed website): OpenSolaris, Mac OS X, BSD.

Asking for a confirmation letter from Oracle seems like a quick, cheap and simple option for anyone who wants to integrate ZFS on Linux. Surely someone could have got that in the years since OpenZFS turned up? If not, what's stopping them?

[yoshi314]

Wow - lots of people who can't use Google.

Here's what Oracle said about ZFS http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic....10810152617279

no, here's what SUN said about ZFS. Oracle is a whole another thing, and they only thing they want is MORE MONEY.

i can imagine that Oracle is planning to release ZFS in OEL with full legal permission. but only with THEIR kernel. i can also imagine them waiting for now and striking against distros embracing ZFS in the future, whenever they smell money.

[carewolf]

All I want is something that can detect bit rot on single drives, without causing some other kind of calamity. I keep everything backed up every 15 minutes, and if I could simply detect bit rot I'd never lose data.

But there simply doesn't appear to be any supported and stable file system on Linux capable of performing that simple task. It's really a shame.

Try activating SMART. We can detect bit-rot on the hardware level.

[polarathene]

Btrfs and Zfs are unstable and Zfs is unsupported as well. That's the problem. In order to detect bit rot with Linux you have to take enormous risks with the data itself because of unstable and unsupported file systems. That's why I said it was a shame.

What? Why do you think BTRFS is unstable? Could you please cite some sources of where that's the case lately(5.x kernels, especially from 5.3+ and no usage of any features that aren't considered stable in the docs). Would be good to know what their setup was, if they were using defaults or toggling certain features/settings, as well as what sort of workloads they were doing.

Sometimes the "unstable" stories are expecting BTRFS to work like EXT4/XFS without taking into account the differences. As far as bit rot detection goes, BTRFS has been known to do that pretty well. Otherwise, the data corruption is often from outdated kernels which had bugs and still be parroted as relevant with BTRFS today.

I'd also love for BTRFS to have 2+ years of stability. There's still random data loss issues popping up, which makes it a file system I don't care to use in production. If BTRFS could be stable, I wouldn't care as much about ZFS. The proposed features are close enough that I could deal with what BTRFS doesn't have if only I didn't risk losing data by using it. Especially with RAID 5/6 support.

Like above, please provide some citation about the random data loss issues you're referring to. What risks with your data are you taking with BTRFS otherwise? If they're valid, then it's good to point out what these are, rather than vaguely categorizing BTRFS usage in any form would result in data loss which is obviously not the case.

RAID 5/6 support is not stable, BTRFS docs don't state that it is. Just assume the feature is not there and don't use it? Otherwise yes, you risk data by using a feature that's not ready or marketed as such, but to claim that makes BTRFS risky to use in general is bollocks.

You're better off with actual offsite backups rather than RAID 5/6. Do you have any real reason to need RAID 5/6 specifically?

ZFS can do all of that. You can mask the permissions and file naming case if you want. It also checksums your data on that removable disk and ensures whatever you put on it is the same thing that comes off it.. not bad for unreliable media. Oh it can encrypt too.. in case you lose it. And that encryption is compatible across all OS's.

Oh? I'll have to give it a look at some point then. Still not great for sharing with others if I have to expect them to install a filesystem just to share the data, but great for personal transfers/access if I can have a smarter exFAT without the permission woes that majority of linux filesystems seem to enforce(great for internal media, not so much for portable external media where I don't care for it and ends up in the way..)

zfs has no data safety on single disk (unlike btrfs).

That's not entirely true. BTRFS isn't as safe on SSDs for single disk like HDD, as SSDs can internally de-dupe blocks, so if bit-rot were to occur you're kinda out of luck there without a backup on another disk. It's mentioned in their docs somewhere if you want confirmation on that concern.

You also mentioned something about FAT which isn't practical depending on filesystem needs, lack of features can cause problems/breakage even if you transfer files via it as a portable medium(instead of via network, or archived). Even slightly more featureful exFAT lacks certain features, Steams proton can't use exFAT for storage due to symlinks with the wine/proton prefixes not being possible/practical.