FreeBSD ZFS File-System Code To Be Re-Based Over ZFS On Linux

[starshipeleven]

Is this accurate? My impression was that FreeBSD ZFS was forked a long time ago from openSolaris, which is that whole illumos deal.

Illumos is some kind of "gold standard Unix" thing many niche Unix systems decided to use as upstream.

Afaik Illumos's ZFS was supposed to be the "upstream" of all ZFS filesystem implementations, FBSD one, ZOL, whatever.

If the main sponsor for ZFS development in Illumos migrates to Linux (and ZOL) which is what happened here, they very well have to follow it if they want to stay alive, as they are just a downstream.

[darkbasic]

Not a surprise, ZOL is extremely well maintained. In another thread someone said that btrfs' rate of development is faster than ZOL's: this proves he was definitely wrong.

[mibo]

I'm glad they join forces. Expecting that a lot bugs in ZOL will be found and fixed. It's a good thing.

[aht0]

This don't make much sense:
1.) SPL still exists but it is integrated on ZFS module now instead of separated
2.) SPL as far as i know still exists on BSD as quoted on the mailing list
"The sources for FreeBSD's ZFS support are currently taken directly
from Illumos with local ifdefs to support the peculiarities of FreeBSD
where the Solaris Portability Layer (SPL) shims fall short"
Remember they are doing this simply because is easier to work with ZOL team than rely on Open/Solaris team that Oracle pretty make sure was non-existant at this point.

I am pessimist and assume that switching to ZoL would mean swapping Solaris ABI (what you described as "SPL") against Linux ABI. After all, ZoL has so far been developed/ported exclusively with Linux in mind.
There are bound to be "Linux'isms" in ZoL, intentional or not. I am pretty sure ZoL devs would not fancy ton of #ifdef's in their code. Unless of course, FreeBSD has enough weight with it's ZFS current "market share" to bully them into it.

If I was to continue with that paranoid and pessimistic mental train of thought: Let's assume FreeBSD starts requiring it's present Linux 64bit translation layer for running ZoL.
While Solaris shim was sufficient for ZFS and not for anything else, through Linux ABI one has ability to actually run Linux ELF-binaries on FreeBSD - as long as these binaries use Linux syscalls implemented in FreeBSD's Linux ABI.

hence it doesn't add any attack surface that weren't there before

Quite the opposite. If loading up Linux64.ko is mandatory for running/using ZFS, it does mean better than just theoretical capability of running also malware targeted at Linux. That was my point about increased attack surface. Not all malware is guaranteed to fail because of being dependent on systemd, bash shell (which, while not default, could be present in system because some installed port also required bash as a dependency) or unimplemented Linux syscalls in FreeBSD's Linux translation layer. Linux ABI in FreeBSD is concurrent with CentOS 6.x (not sure in exact version without proper checking). It can run plethora of Linux software still. Why not malware?

I would not discard that in the future open iteration of solaris will actually switch to work with the ZoL/FreeBSD team as well instead of spent their time begging Oracle for scraps

Solaris has 2 different versions of ZFS. One from OpenSolaris-derived Illumos, another is Oracle's closed-source "official" ZFS. Former is being used in FreeBSD and nobody has begged Oracle for scraps.

[mbello]

"because the main sponsor of ZFS development on Illumos has decided they migrate to Linux/ZOL, so the Solaris/Illumos ZFS codebase is basically going in life support."

Names please!

Linux is in such a momentum, nothing really can come close. It does have its growing pains, but the pace of development is fantastic.

[AndyChow]

"because the main sponsor of ZFS development on Illumos has decided they migrate to Linux/ZOL, so the Solaris/Illumos ZFS codebase is basically going in life support."

Names please!

Linux is in such a momentum, nothing really can come close. It does have its growing pains, but the pace of development is fantastic.

The name is right there in the article. However, it seems a bit like finger pointing in the mailing list, IMO.

[some_canuck]

I'm just going to leave this here... https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/...22eb01a/wakeup

[starshipeleven]

The name is right there in the article. However, it seems a bit like finger pointing in the mailing list, IMO.

Delphix is still one of the "diamond sponsors" of OpenZFS that is moving to a different implementation (still within OpenZFS, ZOL is still part of OpenZFS) though. http://www.open-zfs.org/wiki/Main_Page

And if as they say illumos is lagging behind, this is not really going to improve the situation.

[pal666]

lol, so much for "zfs is stable" fairytales

While working through the git history of ZoL I have also discovered that many races and locking bugs have been fixed in ZoL and never made it back to Illumos and thus FreeBSD

[aht0]

lol, so much for "zfs is stable" fairytales

You ignore the fact that shit locking/racing on Linux wouldn't definitely do it on BSD. No racy systemd, different init, much fewer contesting processes. It remains theoretical possibility though, so it would be stupid to ignore such cases happening on Linux. ZFS has been integral part of FreeBSD since release 7, which came out back in 2008. 10 years has been enough to root out most issues. So keep your bigoted shit talk to yourself