Oracle Talks Up Btrfs Rather Than ZFS For Their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6

[lucrus]

But why is btrfs seen as so much inferior to ZFS? I mean, it seems to be well supported, it seems to have most features (ok, not all of them, but much more features than say ext4 and more than enough features for most users), it seems to be stable enough, LXD recommends ZFS but it offers more features over btrfs, and data losses are memories of the past... I really don't understand, but beware, I'm not using either one, I only use plain old ext4 for now.

[You-]

Heh, I remember many Linux guys justifying Btrfs over ZFS, just because Linux didn't have access to a ZFS implementation at the time (compared to i.e FreeBSD, Solaris it seems Linux was lagging behind).

They had hopes for btrfs, but it disapointed many.

ZFS really isnt available unless you dont mind getting sued - Oracle own the copyrights and are litigation trigger happy. That is why whilst Red hat has stopped expecting btrfs to mature and be supported, they are NOT supporting Open ZFS.

If Oracle wanted to, they could end the whole issue by GPL( or BSDing) the ZFS code base.

Until they its just a trap for anyone with deep pockets. If they can litigate over Java after opensourcing it, this is way worse.

[okapi]

Phoronix: Oracle Talks Up Btrfs Rather Than ZFS For Their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6
Oracle could relicense their in-house ZFS code if they so chose in order to make it upstream-acceptable, but to date they have not

Oracle relicensing their ZFS implementation for Solaris 11 or that from the time of the OpenZFS fork really doesn't help anyone. OpenZFS has years of advances all under the CDDL. Oracle has no copyright ownership on these changes and you need them if you want ZFS on Linux or even BSD. They could duplicate that work but it'd be a mess. And people/organisations invested in OpenZFS would not want it to be GPL licenced either. CDDL code can go in the FreeBSD kernel. They've worked hard to remove the last remnants of GPL2 from base.

[siyia]

I' ve been using btrfs for 5+ years non-commercially together with snapshots and compression (single disk setups) and i seriously don't understand the hate around it, maybe it fails mostly in raid setups? Before trying btrfs, i had a zpool for my root&home using openzfs in archlinux and the filesystem was using a ton of memory, fs speed on day to day usage wasn't significantly faster too with openzfs.

[Britoid]

Heh, I remember many Linux guys justifying Btrfs over ZFS, just because Linux didn't have access to a ZFS implementation at the time (compared to i.e FreeBSD, Solaris it seems Linux was lagging behind).

As soon as ZFS gets ported, they mostly throw away Btrfs (and all the developer efforts). A bit sad really. I suppose progress is often wasteful.

ZFS doesn't even support reflinks.

[andyprough]

Considering they have spent 75 billion on stock buybacks they probably don't even have enough money for good ZFS implementation and testing.

No, if they spent 75 billion on stock buybacks then they probably had a lot more than 75 billion on hand. And the amount of money they spend on ZFS is probably a good indicator of what it is worth to them financially - which is probably very little if anything.

[S.Pam]

Does ZFS support shrinking a pool or changing raid profiles?

I have a btrfs setup with 3 spanned disks (with metadata raid1). One disk is starting to fail and I can't replace it today, so I'm tellingtelling btrfs to remove that disk and shrink the fs. All done live with no downtime

[aht0]

They had hopes for btrfs, but it disapointed many.

ZFS really isnt available unless you dont mind getting sued - Oracle own the copyrights and are litigation trigger happy. That is why whilst Red hat has stopped expecting btrfs to mature and be supported, they are NOT supporting Open ZFS.

If Oracle wanted to, they could end the whole issue by GPL( or BSDing) the ZFS code base.

Until they its just a trap for anyone with deep pockets. If they can litigate over Java after opensourcing it, this is way worse.

Might not be that easy. NetApp and Oracle had court case over ZFS once in the past. Well, they settled it but on what terms..?
Might it be that Oracle is tied to an non-disclosed agreements with NetApp and that's the reason it's not touching ZFS license with 10-feet pole, nor would go ahead and port it to Linux.

Oracle could afterall easily use ZFS (as similar out-of-tree port) on it's RHEL re-spin - it's not going to sue itself over copyrights!!! - and gain competitive advantage while suing everybody else who'd try to run ZFS on Linux.

But in reality it's not doing anything with ZFS at all, excepting use on Solaris. Illogical - unless there are factors in play wider public knows nothing about.

[M@GOid]

At this day and age you think what Oracle gain in keeping ZFS out of Linux kernel. Their Solaris is dead on the water, they even jumped ship to Linux with Unbreakable.

Is just a case of nobody there caring anymore about ZFS, or they really believe there is some financial gain in keeping it under the current licensing?

[Raka555]

I was a big fan of ZFS when I discovered it around 2007. I used it just about everywhere and thought it was the best thing ever.

Then as those filesystems got used more, they all "fell of the cliff" performance wise when they reached about 75%-80% space utilization.

I was called into emergency meetings and stuff where I had to explain to the bosses why they can't use more than 75% disk space of their very expensive SAN/SSD storage.

I lost my appetite for ZFS as a result.

I am curious:
Have that problem, been fixed ?
Does nobody else run into that problem ?
Are all ZFS deployments just toys that does'nt do real IO ?