I don’t understand why you’re being snarky. ZFS has been hugely successful since it’s release, and continues to be successful even now. The reason why it’s popular is precisely because it’s easy to maintain.

Not sure why you’d consider criticism of ZFS to he snark. Running any filesystem outside the mainline kernel is a bunch of extra effort and I’m sure as a ZFS user you’d know that. I’m not sure how ZFS could be “hugely successful” after two decades and still not in the Linux kernel.

> Running any filesystem outside the mainline kernel is a bunch of extra effort and I’m sure as a ZFS user you’d know that

zfs-dkms makes usage simple since openzfs backwards compatible down to 3.xx kernels. no need to mix match zfs with kernel versions anymore.

the only drawback is that you may not get to use the lastest kernel until openzfs mantainers give it the thumbs up (no 6.xx compatible release yet), but that's not "a bunch of extra effort".

and that's only a problem if you want to be in the bleeding edge. LTS kernel users wouldn't know about it.

> I’m not sure how ZFS could be “hugely successful” after two decades and still not in the Linux kernel.

"There is no way I can merge any of the ZFS efforts until I get an official letter from Oracle that is signed by their main legal counsel or preferably by Larry Ellison himself that says that yes, it's OK to do so and treat the end result as GPL'd" -Linus Torvalds

sound like a legal issue more than technical.

IIRC the kernel module also uses a compatibility layer, which is also unlikely to ever be accepted.

So its a technical issue too

LTS kernel users don’t generally have access to ZFS - RHEL won’t touch it with a ten foot pole and very few large organisations use Ubuntu.

Linux users are constantly using drivers outside of the mainline kernel. Whether it’s graphics cards, radio drivers (things have gotten better in that regard but Bluetooth is support is still terrible) or FUSE file systems.

The difference with ZFS is that the code is kernel-ready but there’s just some licensing worries (understandable ones) that stop it from being mainlined.

I’ve been running ZFS on Ubuntu Server for several years now and frankly ZFS is the only part of that entire system that doesn’t suck (in my opinion). I’d switch back to FreeBSD in a heartbeat if I didn’t need Docker support but credit where credit is due, Ubuntu’s ZFS support has been really good.

Edit: just to add, I’ve got nothing against anyone who does enjoy Ubuntu Server. It’s just not a Linux distro I personally have much fondness for.

What do you mean "have been trying to make zfs happen"? ZFS is used in production in many places.

When you say "normally", do you mean "badly, with fsck"?

ZFS is growing incredibly quickly in popularity, and the only reason it's not the dominant filesystem already is because A) it took linux a long time to add support, and only dedicated appliance vendors had the will and ability to move to freebsd and B) macos was going to switch to zfs in the late '00s, but they got scared off by oracle's legal shenanigans, which seems to no longer be a relevant factor.

> A) it took linux a long time to add support

Linux has no support for ZFS. This is an out-of-tree patch set and therefor a no-go for most including myself.

ZFS intentionally has a terrible license and is owned by Oracle. People are free to do what they want but I wish all the time wasted on it could have been put in something more interesting.

As with most thinks in the linux world it depends on who builds your upstream. ZFS is in the kernel distributed by Ubuntu which is one of the largest distributions.

Linux is unlike Eg freebsd not a monolithic operating system, but only a kernel so it is in my opinion not really right to say that it has no support.

> but only a kernel so it is in my opinion not really right to say that it has no support.

The kernel has no native support for ZFS.

Ubuntu may ship with ZFS, but that's one distro. Meanwhile, RHEL etc won't even touch it.

On Linux, XFS dominates and likely will continue to dominate the server world, meanwhile btrfs will slowly erase ext4 in the desktop side of things. Android/Embedded have always used their own different filesystems so it's irrelevant there.

> The kernel has no native support for ZFS.

Neither does it have accelerated Nvidia card support that could be used for things like HPC/AI/ML. Yet I'm administrating an entire cluster of Ubuntu machines with cards just fine.

We generally use the "nvidia-driver-NNN-server" package.

If you want to live ideologically pure no one is going to stop you, but someone of us need to get work done.

It’s not about ideological purity. I don’t want to touch anything a serious Linux distribution won’t support and I don’t consider Ubuntu - a derivative of the over-patched mess that is Debian - a serious distribution.

ZFS is in a very weird position on Linux. It’s unfortunate but that’s mostly due to Sun and Oracle so I don’t feel bad stating people shouldn’t use it.

What packages do you think are overly patched in Debian?

> I don’t want to touch anything a serious Linux distribution won’t support and I don’t consider Ubuntu - a derivative of the over-patched mess that is Debian - a serious distribution.

What defines a "serious distribution"?

It's not about ideologies, using modules outside the kernel is never a good experience for those who use up-to-date distros (e.g. Arch, Fedora etc).

CDDL isn't an especially terrible license in isolation (it's basically Mozilla) but it is generally considered incompatible with GPL which, depending upon which set of 20 year old memories from ex-Sun employees you're inclined to believe, was more or less a deliberately nefarious state of affairs.

Oracle owns most/all of the copyrights and Canonical was willing to take a calculated risk after, presumably, some back-channel discussions. But those companies with something to actually lose from a lawsuit with Oracle or organizations with strong free software principles aren't going anywhere close. Oracle has had a long time to change the license if they actually cared to.

Personally, I find it unfortunate that all the effort that has gone into ZFS as essentially a hobbyist copy-on-write filesystem didn't go into btrfs instead.

> I find it unfortunate that all the effort that has gone into ZFS as essentially a hobbyist copy-on-write filesystem didn't go into btrfs instead.

don't some BSDs and Linux share the same code base for ZFS?

Last I heard FreeBSD switched to ZfsOnLinux as upstream a few years ago before it was merged with OpenZFS.

IMO calling it a hobbyist fs is a bit unfair.

Being called hobbyist software derisively by the Linux community is like being knighted, I assume.

It's not intended to be derisive so much as a simple matter of fact that it's 1.) Not in the mainline kernel; 2.) Isn't supported by most commercial distros; and 3.) Has somewhat ambiguous legal status. For individual use? Knock yourself out. But I wouldn't approve its use for a company unless I had very good and very specific reasons to do so.

While the CDDL isn't a terrible license in a vacuum, it is (according to its author) _intentionally_ incompatible with the GPL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distrib...).

This is, in my opinion, the most important part. It's not some unhappy accident that there are significant legal issues with ZFS and GPL-licenced Linux - that is (allegedly) by design.

As that section says, there is (at least for public consumption) disagreement among then-Sun employees as to what the intent and beliefs were at the time.

I know all those folks to greater or lesser degrees and Sun was a client of mine as an analyst. There were certainly a lot of conflicting motivations and concerns concerning Solaris and Linux.

> ZFS intentionally has a terrible license

The folks on FreeBSD didn't / don't seem to think so. Neither does Apple (who pulled in DTrace, which has the exact same license).

> and is owned by Oracle.

The OpenZFS folks would don't seem to think so.

>The OpenZFS folks would don't seem to think so.

The OpenZFS people are fully aware that Oracle owns ZFS, that's why they forked the last free copy and made OpenZFS, which is called ZFS in contexts like this post. A small nitpick.

I guess the trolls are out today. Thought I was on Reddit for a minute.

> people have been trying to make zfs happen for what… two decades now?

When players like AWS provides ZFS as one of four alternatives in their "filesystem as a service"[1], I'd say we're beyond "trying to make zfs happen".

Not to mention the PB worth of data others[2] rely on ZFS to keep safe.

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/fsx/

[2]: https://openzfs.org/wiki/Companies