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.