Re:BSDs or Illumos may be good alternatives to Linux (2017)
by lmm on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @05:31AM
(#18541151)
> - Linux bad because BTRFS, so it's bad (well, you don't have to use it)
The point is that there are no good filesystem options for Linux. ext4 has various issues mainly due to being ext2 underneath, reiserfs is unmaintained, xfs and jfs have no recovery tools at all (and xfs additionally has the trailing zeroes problem), and all of those require you to use a separate system for RAID for which Linux has no good options (true hardware RAID is expensive, BIOS RAID (dm-raid) and software RAID (md) will kick out disks during a rebuild if they see a single bad sector, which per https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-20... is more likely than not with modern disk sizes. This risk is reduced (but not eliminated) by setting up regular scrubs, but tutorials and installation wizards don't always do that). BTRFS has issues up to and including data loss, userspace ZFS has major performance and reliability issues while in-kernel ZFS on Linux has substantial licensing concerns.
> - BSD jails > anything on linux (I was hoping to see a clear outline of pros/cons, but the author's reasoning is very hard to follow, and the tone is very combative instead of constructive)
Agreed that the writing is bad, but BSD jails do have a much higher level of maturity than linux containers. Linux is probably catching up now given the sheer weight of numbers of people using containers, but I still wouldn't trust them quite as much as BSD jails just yet; various kinds of flakiness and security vulnerabilities still seem relatively common.
The point is that there are no good filesystem options for Linux. ext4 has various issues mainly due to being ext2 underneath, reiserfs is unmaintained, xfs and jfs have no recovery tools at all (and xfs additionally has the trailing zeroes problem), and all of those require you to use a separate system for RAID for which Linux has no good options (true hardware RAID is expensive, BIOS RAID (dm-raid) and software RAID (md) will kick out disks during a rebuild if they see a single bad sector, which per https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-20... is more likely than not with modern disk sizes. This risk is reduced (but not eliminated) by setting up regular scrubs, but tutorials and installation wizards don't always do that). BTRFS has issues up to and including data loss, userspace ZFS has major performance and reliability issues while in-kernel ZFS on Linux has substantial licensing concerns.
> - BSD jails > anything on linux (I was hoping to see a clear outline of pros/cons, but the author's reasoning is very hard to follow, and the tone is very combative instead of constructive)
Agreed that the writing is bad, but BSD jails do have a much higher level of maturity than linux containers. Linux is probably catching up now given the sheer weight of numbers of people using containers, but I still wouldn't trust them quite as much as BSD jails just yet; various kinds of flakiness and security vulnerabilities still seem relatively common.