Ubuntu's ZFS Installation Work Will Continue Into The 20.04 LTS Cycle

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu's ZFS Installation Work Will Continue Into The 20.04 LTS Cycle

With Ubuntu 19.10 one of the changes we have been looking forward to the most is the planned Ubuntu desktop installation support atop ZFS as a root file-system and Canonical's related work around the new ZSYS daemon. It's looking like the basic ZFS root installation support will make it in time for next month's Ubuntu 19.10 release but more advanced installation features won't be ready in time...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-ZFS-To-Be-Continued

[cl333r]

This might be useful for some enterprise folks, but on the desktop it's a meh feature.
So much wasted effort: phones, tablets, Mir, Unity, Upstart, ZFS, snap (wait for it!), the choice of Gtk/Python instead of Qt/C++. The only idea they got right is making Linux easier to use.

[DanL]

This might be useful for some enterprise folks, but on the desktop it's a meh feature.
So much wasted effort: phones, tablets, Mir, Unity, Upstart, ZFS, snap (wait for it!), the choice of Gtk/Python instead of Qt/C++. The only idea they got right is making Linux easier to use.

The biggest waste of effort was the mobile and convergence dead end, but other projects are/were certainly not wasted effort.
- Mir became a useful Wayland compositor (helping MATE with Wayland support).
- Unity had plenty of fans. While I wasn't one of them, I would take it over earlier Gnome-Shell any day.
- Upstart pre-dated systemd.
- As you yourself said, ZFS is useful for enterprise, so they have to integrate it into the installer anyway.
- "choice of Gtk/Python instead of Qt/C++". That's your opinion...

[Oddsocks]

- As you yourself said, ZFS is useful for enterprise, so they have to integrate it into the installer anyway.

File systems like ZFS are extremely useful for desktops too. While enterprises will and have used these advanced features directly for a long time, on the desktop the important part becomes integration within applications. In other words, the 'typical' desktop user has no idea what file system they're running, but some want those files encrypted. They want those files recoverable from some point in time. They want to make that disk bigger or smaller. They don't want disk errors, they want self healing and recovery even if they don't know it. They want to 'undo' that last udpate that broke everything. Many of these things need to be implemented at the file system level, but abstracted at the application level.

[starshipeleven]

This might be useful for some enterprise folks, but on the desktop it's a meh feature.
So much wasted effort: phones, tablets, Mir, Unity, Upstart, ZFS, snap (wait for it!), the choice of Gtk/Python instead of Qt/C++. The only idea they got right is making Linux easier to use.

Yeah sure, the ability to seamlessly rollback any update or system change, make backups and such with an online system, be able to compress the filesystem contents (which can decrease disk space usage significantly, and if you use VMs it's even more important) is something no consumer wants.

Windows never added these features (with varying degrees of reliability) like 10 years ago.

Also totally not what OpenSUSE is already doing with btrfs. Nothing to see there, move along. ZFS is only for enterprise.

[ThoreauHD]

This will be useful for people running home NAS's. Not having support on linux is the only reason why I'm running bsd atm. It's not a useless proposition when Unraid is $130 a pop as a intermediate step to zfs.

[skeevy420]

Yeah sure, the ability to seamlessly rollback any update or system change, make backups and such with an online system, be able to compress the filesystem contents (which can decrease disk space usage significantly, and if you use VMs it's even more important) is something no consumer wants.

Windows never added these features (with varying degrees of reliability) like 10 years ago.

Also totally not what OpenSUSE is already doing with btrfs. Nothing to see there, move along. ZFS is only for enterprise.

Just wait until Stratis starts to pick up some momentum and we have three advanced filesystem methods for people to tell us we don't need

An XFS-based filesystem using pools and inspired by ZFS? Yes Please and Thanks Red Hat Developers

[discordian]

Aint there licensing problems with CDDL and GPL if you ship kernel modules, does the installer compile the kernel modules on request?

[skeevy420]

Aint there licensing problems with CDDL and GPL if you ship kernel modules, does the installer compile the kernel modules on request?

Nope. That's why it's a module and not built-in.

[starshipeleven]

This will be useful for people running home NAS's. Not having support on linux is the only reason why I'm running bsd atm. It's not a useless proposition when Unraid is $130 a pop as a intermediate step to zfs.

Unraid is not anywhere near "intermediate" to ZFS. It's just a custom software RAID implementation that looks a lot like RAID4 with a polished interface and plugin system.

Afaik at the moment you can use OpenMediavault (with third party repository) if you want ZFS on Linux (Debian-based distribution).