OpenZFS Launches To Promote Open-Source ZFS

[liam]

Would you elaborate on what that reason is? It cannot be money. So far, all of my contributions to ZFS have been as a volunteer and that only income that I have derived from them is a copy of Solaris Internals that someone gave me.

I've no idea where you work, so no, I wasn't thinking of money (though you've written some previous posts where you were a pretty vocal oracle booster which suggests SOME connection to them, but not necessarily one of employment). You seem to do some amount of porting work of zfs to the *bsds, and are friendly with the zfs developers. It's those last two things that lead me to what I said.
Aside from that, I thought it astonishingly distasteful that you would question Valerie's creds. Rather than addressing the concerns she mentioned you choose to argue, essentially, ad hominen.

[johnc]

I've no idea where you work, so no, I wasn't thinking of money (though you've written some previous posts where you were a pretty vocal oracle booster which suggests SOME connection to them, but not necessarily one of employment). You seem to do some amount of porting work of zfs to the *bsds, and are friendly with the zfs developers. It's those last two things that lead me to what I said.
Aside from that, I thought it astonishingly distasteful that you would question Valerie's creds. Rather than addressing the concerns she mentioned you choose to argue, essentially, ad hominen.

The problem is that the argument presented here, at least from my view, rested on her credentials. In other words, we were to believe that she had some kind of insider information on the trappings of ZFS that we were supposed to take seriously. Though her actual points weren't even that dire.

I think it's kinda inarguable that ZFS is the best filesystem for data security right now.

[grahamperrin]

OpenZFS compatibility

What is the status of the various ZFS pool versions? Is there only a split now between Oracle Solaris and the rest of the open implementations (FreeBSD, Linux, Illumos, etc.)? Or are all the open implementations fragmented as well?

http://open-zfs.org/wiki/FAQ is now more prominent. There are answers to frequently asked questions about compatibility; a key phrase:

• feature flags.

OpenZFS will improve platform interoperability.

To some degree, OpenZFS is just putting a name to what the community was already doing and for example, feature flags were proposed more than two years ago.

[liam]

The problem is that the argument presented here, at least from my view, rested on her credentials. In other words, we were to believe that she had some kind of insider information on the trappings of ZFS that we were supposed to take seriously. Though her actual points weren't even that dire.

I think it's kinda inarguable that ZFS is the best filesystem for data security right now.

I can't help how you view arguments, but she has been a pretty influential fs developer according to her wikipedia page (her maiden name is Henson) since she's done more than just zfs.
As for "insider information", the project is oss so I don't know what that even means. The points she made about issues with zfs were fragmentation (related to a hacky, according to her, method to get around the preallocated blocksizes and zfs' requirement that an object not make use of blocks of different sizes) and inability to do true partition shrinking.
No one is saying that zfs is a bad fs. As you say it might very well be the best we have (though, as I've said elsewhere, amplidata's dss looks next-generational), but that doesn't mean it is perfect, or couldn't be improved. Btrfs looks to be able to fix some of these issues but it remains to be seen if it can match the rest of zfs' positive attributes.

[dee.]

As for "insider information", the project is oss so I don't know what that even means.

Nitpick: Open source doesn't necessarily imply open development model.

[liam]

Nitpick: Open source doesn't necessarily imply open development model.

I don't see why that matters since I was talking about the code, not how the code got to its current state.

[dee.]

I don't see why that matters since I was talking about the code, not how the code got to its current state.

"As for "insider information", the project is oss so I don't know what that even means."

This seems like you were implying that a concept like "insider information" wouldn't apply to a project that is open source. I was only commenting on this line, because it seems to give the impression that there's no such thing as insider information in open source. Or maybe, that you don't know what would be considered "insider information" when talking about open source software. If that's the case, the answer is simply, the same thing that is considered "insider information" when talking about any other kind of software: something only the "insiders" - ie. people involved with the development of the software - are privy to.

There's plenty of software that is open source, but is still developed behind closed doors, with only the people involved in the project knowing what is going on between releases. Like Android, or Ubuntu (to an extent). As such, "insider information" would be anything known only to the developers but not to the public.

[ryao]

I've no idea where you work, so no, I wasn't thinking of money (though you've written some previous posts where you were a pretty vocal oracle booster which suggests SOME connection to them, but not necessarily one of employment). You seem to do some amount of porting work of zfs to the *bsds, and are friendly with the zfs developers. It's those last two things that lead me to what I said.
Aside from that, I thought it astonishingly distasteful that you would question Valerie's creds. Rather than addressing the concerns she mentioned you choose to argue, essentially, ad hominen.

Most of my life has been spent as a student and I am rather young. So far, I have no connection with Oracle or any other software company.

As for Valerie, her article was linked specifically because she claimed a connection to ZFS (that implied an authoritative position) and she stated that she believed btrfs was better. I find it doubtful that it would have been linked if one of those two were not the case. It is therefore perfectly valid to question her connection to ZFS. Making some minor contributions to an early prototype that likely did not survive in what is now known as ZFS does not make one a ZFS developer. I can say with confidence that any claim that her opinions are that of a ZFS developer are false.

That being said, I cannot say that I am interested in doing the analysis of her article that you want. People who link it have already decided that they prefer btrfs and that is fine. Any attempt at analysis will predictably result in responses either nitpicking in the case that I do write one or stating that I cannot in the case that I do not. Given that this exercise is a complete waste of time, I will opt for the latter. In this case, that would not be entirely untrue. There exist people that are far better qualified to do this analysis than myself. Of course, this exercise would be a waste of time for them too.

I will leave you with one interesting fact. ZFS fills predictably such that writes will fail with ENOSPC only when df reports less space than the write (e.g. 0). btrfs can report ENOSPC without warning even when df reports substantial free space. A rebalance will fix things until the next ENOSPC, but that is not well suited for production environments, where space requirements need to be predictable. Few who read Valerie's claims of efficiency in comparison to ZFS would expect btrfs to have this problem when ZFS is free of it. Even fewer would expect btrfs to have pioneered it.

[ryao]

I can't help how you view arguments, but she has been a pretty influential fs developer according to her wikipedia page (her maiden name is Henson) since she's done more than just zfs.
As for "insider information", the project is oss so I don't know what that even means. The points she made about issues with zfs were fragmentation (related to a hacky, according to her, method to get around the preallocated blocksizes and zfs' requirement that an object not make use of blocks of different sizes) and inability to do true partition shrinking.
No one is saying that zfs is a bad fs. As you say it might very well be the best we have (though, as I've said elsewhere, amplidata's dss looks next-generational), but that doesn't mean it is perfect, or couldn't be improved. Btrfs looks to be able to fix some of these issues but it remains to be seen if it can match the rest of zfs' positive attributes.

Valerie is the only person of which I am aware who has claimed that the use of gang blocks to be "hacky". The extent approach in btrfs could be considered the same concept applied to the entire file. All filesystems fragment files when there is insufficient contiguous free space.

With that said, real issues are things that affect userland. This is not one of them.

[hasib39]

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