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Re: alternative file systems



I've been running Zfsonlinux.org zfs on debian for maybe two years. I don't have root fs on zfs. I keep a working copy of the system dirs I have mounted on zfs on ext3. (Var and usr). ONE time, the dkms had problems and I was glad I had those extra copies (rsync from the zfs ones in a cron job)
I don't see zfs as super fast, lvm based raid would be faster. But the snapshots and other features are awesome. I love cloning a vm instantly.

On October 11, 2014 9:33:15 PM EDT, lee <lee@yagibdah.de> wrote:
Reco <recoverym4n@gmail.com> writes:

Hi.

On Sat, 11 Oct 2014 03:20:50 +0200
lee <lee@yagibdah.de> wrote:

The license of ZFS makes it impossible to be part of
the kernel per se. The DKMS system is well known for supporting kernel
modules for video and wireless hardware among others.

So there isn't really any way to tell whether it works or not?

ZFS is out-of-tree kernel module. It *will* break sooner or later. Every
out-of-tree module does.

Hm. I've seen it happening, and since then, I do not at all like the
idea of using hardware that isn't supported by something in the kernel.
When it happens, it might even be worse with file systems than it is
with hardware.

Which
kernel version is ZFS based on/for?

[1] tells us that ZFS on Linux verion 0.6.3 supports kernels 2.6.26 -
3.16.

Cool, apparently they even test it with Debian kernels :)

Btrfs wouldn't let me do RAID-5 --- perhaps 3.2 kernels are too old for
that?

A correct guess. A recommended minimum is kernel 3.14 - [2].

So this is a rather new feature. How reliable and how well does it
work?

But, ZFS won't allow you to make a conventional RAID5 either :)

I know --- and I don't require RAID-5. What I require is what RAID-5
provides, i. e. redundancy without wasting as many disks as other RAID
levels. I also like the better performance of hardware RAID compared to
software RAID. IIRC, ZFS would provide efficient redundancy and be
safer than a RAID controller because of it's checksumming. I'd have to
try it out to see what kind of performance degradation or gain it would
bring about.

They need to get these license issues fixed ...

Back in the old days CDDL was chosen by Sun especially so that
this license issue would *never* be fixed.
Currently Oracle could re-license ZFS to anything they want, including
GPL-compatible license, but why would *they* do it?

Why don't they?


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