OpenZFS 2.0 Out In 2020 With Unified Linux/FreeBSD Support, OpenZFS 3.0 With macOS

[Volta]

I wonder if Oracle has any competent people working for it. They have a real Unix OS that pioneered a lot of things, Dtrace, ZFS, Containers and are willing to just let it stagnate. I once read an article comparing the source code of Solaris to Linux and it said how much better engineered the Solaris code was. As an undergrad we got to install OpenSolaris and it was a rock solid system. It pains me to see Oracle not give a darn about it. Instead there best effort is a copy of Red Hat Linux? Really?

I read this article as well, but it was draft that was never finished, because then it would be verified. That article was full of bullshit and Solaris code was just a huge mess. Proof? It's nearly dead and stagnates since long time like 'true' Unix. I thought tracing tools, file systems and containers were available before, so they don't seem to be pioneered by slowlaris.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Solaris-Old-C-Code-To-Python

[starshipeleven]

To quote Bryan Cantrill, "What you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is."

"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison"

Lol. that's around 38:00 timestamp in that video. It's good advice, and a fun commentary on Oracle and the death of Solaris.

He always gave me strong Tony Stark vibes.

[starshipeleven]

I read this article as well, but it was draft that was never finished, because then it would be verified. That article was full of bullshit and Solaris code was just a huge mess. Proof? It's nearly dead and stagnates since long time like 'true' Unix.

That's just proof of Oracle not wanting to invest time in developing their own OS when they can just milk the old customer base that is locked in at no real cost, especially now that they can just rebrand CentOS as their "way forward".

[Volta]

That's just proof of Oracle not wanting to invest time in developing their own OS when they can just milk the old customer base that is locked in at no real cost, especially now that they can just rebrand CentOS as their "way forward".

That's true. However, if it was good Sun would have done something about it to not let it die. That's my simple point. Maybe it's too simple, but I believe it's true. Furthermore, there seems to be no interest in open source Solaris.

[starshipeleven]

That's true. However, if it was good Sun would have done something about it to not let it die. That's my simple point. Maybe it's too simple, but I believe it's true.

Your beliefs are not relevant, Sun was quite a bit more than just ZFS. They had a full software stack with Java, OpenOffice, Solaris, down to their own CPU design for their workstation and servers.

They had a huge blow on hardware sales when the dot-com bubble burst, and they never really recovered from that.

That's yet another reason Microsoft weathered the debacles of Windows 8 and later relatively well, massive loss of hardware sales does hurt them, yes, but not anywhere near as bad as it hurts Intel. So they have time to move to "cloud stuff", while Intel was stuck at trying to teach laptop manufacturers how to copy Apple properly with the whole Ultrabook thing.

Furthermore, there seems to be no interest in open source Solaris.

That's what usually happens to a opensource project that is mostly a code drop (or singlehandedly developed) from a single company when the company dies or abandons it.

You can observe the same behavior with Ubuntu Touch (Canonical's dead smartphone OS), a "community" project is keeping it on life support, but does it really have a bright future?

This is what would also happen if Google decided to just drop Android tomorrow. Most OEMs really are just hacking around Google's code drops, they will just keep it on life support like the Illumos has done for Solaris.

[Volta]

Your beliefs are not relevant, Sun was quite a bit more than just ZFS. They had a full software stack with Java, OpenOffice, Solaris, down to their own CPU design for their workstation and servers.

They had a huge blow on hardware sales when the dot-com bubble burst, and they never really recovered from that.

Except Solaris was being replaced by Linux before Sun's problems.

[kreijack]

Sorry just my usual unqualified lament
I just see btrfs development stagnant and zfs getting slowly traction in the Linux ecosystem by offering a complete solution. I think btrfs might have many technical pros over zfs (on the paper), but I think Oracle behind the scenes it's fuckin it all up...

[Disclaimer, I made some small contribution to BTFRS]
I have to agree that it seems BTRFS lost some attraction. However I have to point out that recently in the BTRFS mailing list appeared some patches like:
- RAID1 with 3 and 4 copies
- A more smarter chunk allocator (with handle better the degraded mode)

So I don't think that talking of "stagnant development" is correct. Anyway I am guessing which filesystem could be considered under fully development: even XFS, EXT4, BTRFS, OpenZFS/ZOL are in a consolidating phase.
The only exception which comes to me is bacachefs (!) ; however this is a one-man project; I was never able to find any mailing list; no community ... So I don't have too much expectation.

My feeling was that BTRFS is a very complex beast.
Collapsing the layers filesystem and device management in the same thing, at the time seemed a great idea (a lot of opportunity for improvement, like RAID rebuilding of the basis of the checksums) however create a very large code base with a lot of nasty corner case (like shrinking a filesystem with quota)...

It is true, some features still needed a lot of care (like RAID5/6). I hope that these issue will be addressed in the future.

[aht0]

Poor you BTRFS...
Hey Bcachefs, I wonder.. how you doing?

10 years later:
Poor you Bcachefs..
Hey NewShinyFS, how you doing?