NixOS Takes Action After 1.2GB/s ZFS Encryption Speed Drops To 200MB/s With Linux 5.0+

[skeevy420]

Debatable. But novelty or not, it's not worth the extra effort required, when the mainline AMD drivers work so well. Why would a Linux user bother with nvidia anymore in 2019?? Same goes for ZFS.

While I'm an AMD user, Nvidia supposedly has better OpenCL support, machine learning and AI stuff, they have the highest performing GPUs in regards to games according to Michael's benchmarks, they have better power to performance ratios...plenty of reasons to choose Nvidia.

I personally wouldn't choose them, but all I care really about is a working desktop and games and AMD delivers that in spades with open source goodness that gives great long term support that, in turn, helps make spiffy projects like gallium-nine and dkvk-ags possible.

As for ZFS, that's simple, feature for feature it's the best around and no other file system compares to it. BTRFS on LVM on LUKS is the closest Linux/GPL analog to what ZFS contains in a single, coherent package and tool-set. I became a ZFS user because I'd rather learn and deal with just ZFS over BTRFS and LVM and LUKS. My only real issue with ZFS is dealing with boot loaders...but that's a problem that I know that BTRFS and LUKS have had from time to time so it's hard to blame that on just ZFS and really falls back on my earlier comment of "use out-of-tree stuff, deal with out-of-tree problems".

I'd love some Linux/GPL-only, self-contained file system that does what ZFS does, and if we had it, I'd use it. Call me weird, but random file system over separate volume manager over separate encryption manager just seems like trouble waiting to happen.

[torsionbar28]

Is the Nvidia driver a novelty? Nope.

Debatable. But novelty or not, it's not worth the extra effort required, when the mainline AMD drivers work so well. Why would a Linux user bother with nvidia anymore in 2019?? Same goes for ZFS.

[jpg44]

It seems like this removal was simply made out of spite against people who were using ZFS and for no other reason.

[oiaohm]

Michael, no discussions regarding the possible legal issues of this patch?

See: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comme...again/en4yjr1/

Possible legal issues is understatement. Its really simple to forget Linux kernel containers patented technologies. So patent infringement on the Linux kernel pool of patents is more than possible by a patch like this. Just like ZFS for Linux don't want to change from their current license due to patent infringement risks.

[Bsdisbetter]

Honestly, I think Redhat's new Filesystems will probably kill ZFS. Redhat has a better reputation than Oracle and corporate users will not want to store important data on some makeshift Linux bridge.

In the short term I'm sure Oracle will profit from support contracts as they have been, I don't think they will do the required work to keep the market cornered. There are lots of users that would still pick BTRFS over ZFS just because of in-tree support alone, and with Redhat's offerings coming to the table in the future I would not be betting money of ZFS being anything more than legacy.

Where does redhat have a better reputation? I mean, what does that even mean.
Oracle are more than happy for you to use Oracle ASM. Zfs is no pre-requisite. They're a db company first, a hardware supplier second, a support-shop third and an os provider last (at least in my many years of dealing with them).
They use linux because they can exploit it. Initially this was, i believe, to get a foot in the intel market when under Sun because solaris was ... ahem... shit on non-Sparc.

[Bsdisbetter]

Linux kernel developers are back to breaking out of the tree modules? Nice!

Let's have a thousand apologists explaining why the Linux kernel is great and how it's everyone else's fault. And don't tell me about licensing, relicensing, open sourcing (in case of NVIDIA) and other shit. In case Linux developers don't want to properly support your hardware, its support will be dropped.

[..snip...]

It's what happens when you adopt viral licensing like gpl.

[Bsdisbetter]

There is a fundamental problem here. If the license is disallowing it from being maintained in the kernel, it's a novelty. It's nothing other than a hobby filesystem. And that's all it ever will be until Oracle's lawyers get off their ass. If they can buy multi-million dollar companies and rip them apart to their bare atoms, they can figure out licensing on one fking driver.

No enterprise is going to put their faith in a dkms module for petabytes of data. They really need to sort this horse shit out before ZFS dies from apathy and neglect.

Are you serious? Oracle is a very different beast to Sun; very different. Oracle has always been a hater of open source. They will never release zfs source and their shareholders will agree, just to benefit some non-oracle users. It isn't happening. So wishful thinking is just that.

They make huge sums of money selling hardware and matching zfs solutions, they're not going to forego that. Your ONLY hope is they are bought out by a company that like to give to the open source community, a company like ... .... hmmm can't think of any.

[blackiwid]

Would all this bsd lovers really like to have a fully integrated zfs in Linux? Then bsd would loose the only feature anybody uses their OS for. (except big companies for proprietary stuff). Good the zfs code could become better through more devs but therefor the users that use bsd would go down drastically from a very low point already.
The only thin foiled hat thing I could think of is that they would see it as reason to split the Linux community and weaken the Linux marketing / progression with that

Every one that wants it in Linux sounds to me like a guy that says please I hate BSD so much let me use it in Linux that I don't have to use bsd anymore, but that might be my fantasies.

But yes I see no reason to use openzfs this target audience the enterprises wouldn't they use just the oracle stuff that is newer and better? Why use the amateur fork? It's for me like guy that goes to schools and gives a small dosage of drug for free to the children then later they will get the hard stuff from Oracle

[birdie]

Linux kernel developers are back to breaking out of the tree modules? Nice!

Let's have a thousand apologists explaining why the Linux kernel is great and how it's everyone else's fault. And don't tell me about licensing, relicensing, open sourcing (in case of NVIDIA) and other shit. In case Linux developers don't want to properly support your hardware, its support will be dropped. In case Linux developers don't have your variant of HW it might not be fully/properly supported. And then we have the hardware which is supposedly supported and yet we have major issues and regressions because patches are often not tested well enough or not tested enough. What a beautiful development model. What a fucking mess. Kernel devs: "We support only what we are willing to support and we support only as much, so that it works for us".

You know why enterprise prefers RHEL and normal people prefer the Linux kernel in Android? Because RedHat/Google are the only two companies which distribute the Linux kernel which works. Releases on kernel.org are mostly shit.

It's laughable when for each "stable" kernel release Greg HK writes this shit: "All users must upgrade". He doesn't even care that "stable" kernel releases often contain major regressions which were merged as quick and untested fixes.

Meanwhile the Linux kernel still doesn't have a single reliable and stable filesystem which sports compression. Btrfs doesn't count since RedHat doesn't include it in RHEL 8.

Honestly, I think Redhat's new Filesystems will probably kill ZFS. Redhat has a better reputation than Oracle and corporate users will not want to store important data on some makeshift Linux bridge.

In the short term I'm sure Oracle will profit from support contracts as they have been, I don't think they will do the required work to keep the market cornered. There are lots of users that would still pick BTRFS over ZFS just because of in-tree support alone, and with Redhat's offerings coming to the table in the future I would not be betting money of ZFS being anything more than legacy.

We'll see about the reputation... Redhat has been bought by IBM.