News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Linus Torvalds says “Don’t use ZFS”–but doesn’t seem to u... by washadjeffmad on Monday January 13, 2020 @10:22AM (#22035151)
Some miscommunication here. TFA doesn't distinguish between Oracle's ZFS and the Solaris fork, OpenZFS. Linus seems to be making comments about the former and is likely mixing up a few details about ZFSonLinux. His non-maintenance comments also appear to be about about the fork and probably mean "not keeping pace of feature parity with ZFS proper", which it doesn't.

I think he's just baffled by why anyone would expect the Linux kernel to make a special exception to support ZoL when there are already great native tools and the BSDs exist. And if you really need production ZFS, why not just buy into the officially maintained version from Oracle because you're not getting on-call support, paid or otherwise, from the open projects or Linux.

Largely, the article contains no impact or petition and reads like a click-trap set with Linus bait by someone with a real interest in defending (Open)ZFS's cult status as the pinnacle of all filesystems. I use ZoL at home, but it's not something I'd expect to see above SMB.

Re:Linus Torvalds says “Don’t use ZFS”–but doesn’t seem to u... by jackhalford on Monday January 13, 2020 @02:24PM (#22037647)
> I think he's just baffled by why anyone would expect the Linux kernel to make a special exception to support ZoL when there are already great native tools and the BSDs exist. And if you really need production ZFS.

Couple things, first, some race conditions have been fixed on ZoL but not on the BSDs openZFS. It has been decided that ZoL is the "reference now.

Second, sometimes we may just want to switch from ext4 to ZoL but don't have the luxury to switch OSes.

Re:Linus Torvalds says “Don’t use ZFS”–but doesn’t seem to u... by ptomato on Monday January 13, 2020 @12:39PM (#22036623)
> already great native tools

This really is not the case. The closest thing is btrfs, which has a more limited feature set and a justified reputation for eating data; it's impossible to do a safe equivalent of e.g. a raidz2 pool with it

Re:Linus Torvalds says “Don’t use ZFS”–but doesn’t seem to u... by kstenerud on Monday January 13, 2020 @02:06PM (#22037481)
> I think he's just baffled by why anyone would expect the Linux kernel to make a special exception to support ZoL

This isn't about special exceptions for ZoL. It's about removing FPU access in what appears to be a swipe by Kroah-Hartman against ZFS (maybe it was coincidental - we'll never know).

> And if you really need production ZFS, why not just buy into the officially maintained version from Oracle because you're not getting on-call support, paid or otherwise, from the open projects or Linux.

In that case, why use open source at all? Because you're not getting on-call support, paid or otherwise. And yet almost all modern companies DO use open source products in production.

> Largely, the article contains no impact or petition and reads like a click-trap set with Linus bait by someone with a real interest in defending (Open)ZFS's cult status as the pinnacle of all filesystems.

Really? So the part where he says that his gripe is about the public, well-respected figure Linus, publicly denigrating and spreading misinformation about another open source project while remaining willfully ignorant about it, contains no impact or petition?

If Microsoft had done it, we'd all be crying FUD.

Re:Linus Torvalds says “Don’t use ZFS”–but doesn’t seem to u... by cesarb on Monday January 13, 2020 @02:50PM (#22037904)
> It's about removing FPU access in what appears to be a swipe by Kroah-Hartman against ZFS (maybe it was coincidental - we'll never know).

It wasn't Greg Kroah-Hartman: https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/12209993e98c5fa1855c467f22...

That commit has the real reason: "With EFI gone as the last user of __kernel_fpu_{begin|end}(), both can be made static and not exported anymore." So yes, it was fully coincidental.