Ubuntu Developers Seem To Be Really Pursuing ZFS Root Partition Support On The Desktop

[k1e0x]

Sounds like a call to boycott Canonical (and possibly sue them due to license breaches) to me. I hope they back down before they actually deface GNU GPL, because they're large enough to become a scapegoat. People posting publicly should back off and think again before publicly considering whether breaking GPL is a good idea (it's not).

I hope Linux developers will wage a war against ZFS, as it will enforce the GNU GPL, and with enough pressure it might cause Oracle to re-license their file system under acceptable terms (not that I care about the file system).

The hell?? lol

It's not breaking the GPL anymore than your Nvidia driver. The difference is ZFS is actually open source.. Nvidia isn't. (you've no problem with that tho right?) And Oracle does not control the license to ZoL or OpenZFS.

I'm glad Linux is moving forward and getting a terrific file system out to every day users. Good job! Data integrity for everyone! .. and it's about time.

[Chugworth]

Well it's interesting news for me. ZFS on Linux version 0.8 is looking to be pretty nice. I've lost faith in Btrfs, and Red Hat's answer to it is a big joke. Bcachefs does look hopeful, but how many more years until it becomes a trustworthy filesystem with features that compare to ZFS or Btrfs?

ZFS gives some nice features. Obviously the snapshots are great, but the send and receive features are very nice as well. Or you could make backups from servers that aren't running ZFS by using rsync with the "--inplace" switch, then take a snapshot of it for ultimate space savings. Really cool stuff.

[MrMorden]

I'd like to think I'm somewhat educated about ZFS, but I'm still kind of puzzled as to why folks want to use it as a root file system, particularly with a single drive (as I assume most Desktop installs would use). Do the ZFS permissions, quotas, etc become all that useful to Desktop installs?

Snapshots are moderately useful (although you can get some of that capability with LVM); being able to quickly zfs send those snapshots to a file server and have them available forever is crazy useful.

[Buntolo]

Pretty much this. Upstream Linux developers should remind Canonical that the GPL matters and that the onus is on ZFS to comply with it, not the other way around. From a technical point of view ZFS makes me puke on a server; on a desktop the idea is downright repulsive IMO.

Can you explain why?

[starshipeleven]

I'd like to think I'm somewhat educated about ZFS, but I'm still kind of puzzled as to why folks want to use it as a root file system, particularly with a single drive (as I assume most Desktop installs would use). Do the ZFS permissions, quotas, etc become all that useful to Desktop installs?

Snapshots and volumes is the main functionality for that afaik. It's basically a "windows restore points" done right, allowing you to rollback your ssytem to a specific point in time.

Ubuntu is deploying their own utility to do that https://blog.ubuntu.com/2018/10/15/d...-zfs-with-maas

While OpenSUSE has Snapper for the same job on Btrfs.

[skeevy420]

The hell?? lol

It's not breaking the GPL anymore than your Nvidia driver. The difference is ZFS is actually open source.. Nvidia isn't. (you've no problem with that tho right?) And Oracle does not control the license to ZoL or OpenZFS.

I'm glad Linux is moving forward and getting a terrific file system out to every day users. Good job! Data integrity for everyone! .. and it's about time.

As it is, Linus Torvalds himself has already settled this argument for us:

Basically:
- anything that was written with Linux in mind (whether it then _also_
works on other operating systems or not) is clearly partially a derived
work.
- anything that has knowledge of and plays with fundamental internal
Linux behaviour is clearly a derived work. If you need to muck around
with core code, you're derived, no question about it.

Historically, there's been things like the original Andrew filesystem
module: a standard filesystem that really wasn't written for Linux in the
first place, and just implements a UNIX filesystem. Is that derived just
because it got ported to Linux that had a reasonably similar VFS interface
to what other UNIXes did? Personally, I didn't feel that I could make that
judgment call. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but it clearly is a gray
area.

Personally, I think that case wasn't a derived work, and I was willing to
tell the AFS guys so.

Does that mean that any kernel module is automatically not a derived work?
HELL NO! It has nothing to do with modules per se, except that non-modules
clearly are derived works (if they are so central to the kenrel that you
can't load them as a module, they are clearly derived works just by virtue
of being very intimate - and because the GPL expressly mentions linking).

So being a module is not a sign of not being a derived work. It's just
one sign that _maybe_ it might have other arguments for why it isn't
derived.

There we go. AFS and ZFS are both kernel modules for Unix-styled file systems, use incompatible-with-GPL licenses, and share similar features to works that exist in the kernel. Because of that, any case brought before a court would likely win in ZFS's favor and potentially weaken the GPL at the same time.

[starshipeleven]

It's not breaking the GPL anymore than your Nvidia driver.

Technically speaking the NVIDIA driver is breaking GPL and they are using GPL-reserved interfaces.

They sidestep the GPL by having the end user compile it in their system, but that's a legal hoop.

Kernel devs said many times that they are "tolerated", but not liked.

I'm glad Linux is moving forward and getting a terrific file system out to every day users. Good job! Data integrity for everyone! .. and it's about time.

Yeah, btrfs is getting better and better every day.

[mskarbek]

Snapshots are moderately useful (although you can get some of that capability with LVM); being able to quickly zfs send those snapshots to a file server and have them available forever is crazy useful.

I have dracut module that snapshots root dataset during each boot combined with dnf plugin that is doing the same during each packages change. This combined with regular home dataset snapshots and send/receive sync with external storage and you can sleep peacefully.

[rleigh]

I hope Linux developers will wage a war against ZFS, as it will enforce the GNU GPL, and with enough pressure it might cause Oracle to re-license their file system under acceptable terms (not that I care about the file system).

The ZFS CDDL licence permits combining with other software licences, including proprietary ones, so long as you comply with the licence terms. This was a requirement for using OpenSolaris which also included some proprietary bits not owned by Sun. The incompatibility stems from the GPL, which does not allow this. However, since Linux specifically permits third-party modules under non-GPL licenses, this isn't a problem in practice.

As for Oracle relicensing it, OpenZFS has been maintained independently of Oracle for many years now. Even if Oracle relicense the original ZFS implementation, it will require every OpenZFS contributor to also relicense their contributions. That might be impossible.

"Waging war" is a very absurd and hyperbolic comment. Why would you want to "wage war" on a top-notch open-source filesystem; arguably the best filesystem which is available for Linux today.

[k1e0x]

Technically speaking the NVIDIA driver is breaking GPL and they are using GPL-reserved interfaces.

They sidestep the GPL by having the end user compile it in their system, but that's a legal hoop.

Kernel devs said many times that they are "tolerated", but not liked.

Yeah, btrfs is getting better and better every day.

All they have to do is put it in a non-free repo (even tho it does not belong there, it's more permissively licensed than Linux itself.) and they are good. The end user can decide to install whatever they want. This *is* a good thing too.. It's light years ahead of NTFS.. isn't actual proprietary software the enemy? Or are we going to say your open source isn't good enough for my open source and wait for Microsoft to make something better?

ZoL also offered to replace all of Oracles code in a massive rewrite and dual-license it GPL-CDDL. Kernel dev's went silent on that offer so... it isn't a problem with the ZoL team..