Open ZFS wielders kick off 'truly open source' dev group A bunch of companies that rely on ZFS to power their products have banded together in a new open source cabal that says it will offer a "truly open source" version of the filesystem. The group revealed itself to the world yesterday, erecting the eponymous open-zfs.org website and announcing an intention to do the following …
It's not the Pi support per se that is the limiting factor on the Linux implementation, it's generally the support for 32-bit platforms. ZFS was designed for a 64-bit platform with a very robust kernel virtual memory subsystem. Linux's kernel virtual memory is somewhat crippled (it's use is generally discouraged, as there are usually better ways to do things), and when you combine that with generally memory starved 32-bit platforms you run into problems.
The FreeBSD implementation works much better if you are stuck with 32-bit hardware. Or if you really want to run Linux on a 32-bit platform with ZFS, zfs-fuse works very well.
"Looks like the takeover has turned out to be a very good thing for (F(L))OSS."
In my opinion the takeover has done no such thing. Nothing good has come from it.
It's not the takeover which pushed these products into the open source environment, that was basically the "obsession" with open source software living within Sun Microsystems. Don't forget that FreeBSD gained ZFS support by porting the code from Solaris, and all at a time where Sun was still a separate company.
If the Trojans had looked their gift horse in the mouth, they would have found it was full of Greek soldiers. Likewise ZFS is stuffed with patents. It is not possible to simultaneously satisfy the terms of the GPL and CDDL in a single piece of software, in part because GPL would require a patent license that Sun/Oracle do not provide. You are welcome to get sued like a GIF user, but I will stick to GPL or compatible. BTW: pi's already have BTRFS.
Since when is the GPL the yardstick by which free or open source software is measured?
I wonder if you do really 'stick to GPL', or just think you do. Do you use X11? That's an MIT licence. Do you use Apache? Apache licence. Firefox? MPL. And so on.
If you don't agree with non-GPL code, don't use any of the above.
HereWeGoAgain:
Since when is the GPL the yardstick by which free or open source software is measured?
Since about 70% of open source projects select a GPL license.
I wonder if you do really 'stick to GPL', or just think you do. Do you use X11? That's an MIT licence. Do you use Apache? Apache licence. Firefox? MPL. And so on.
'stick to GPL' is your phrase, not mine. I am very well aware of the licenses for X11, Apache and Firefox. All the licenses you just mentioned are GPL compatible. I have a specific problem with the CDDL, and why Sun selected it.
Oninoshiko: You are welcome to pull a ZFS disk out of a Mac and plug it into a Solaris box. I pick the most appropriate file system available on the OS and move data with a network connection. Where is the limitation?
"Oninoshiko: You are welcome to pull a ZFS disk out of a Mac and plug it into a Solaris box. I pick the most appropriate file system available on the OS and move data with a network connection. Where is the limitation?"
I was responding the the immediately prior poster who's comment implied ZFS has less traction then BTRFS, despite ZFS being more widely available on different platforms. We where discussing the limitation in the availability of different FSes.
You've chosen to link to a rather disingenuous article by Greg DeKoenigsberg. It's funny how he thought SUN should go to GPL3, but has no problem with Linux NOT. If it was just about keeping ZFS out of the Linux kernel, they could have made it GPL3, because GPL3 is incompatible with GPL2, so it STILL would not be able to be included with the Linux kernel.
The Linux kernel is limited to GPL2, and is not distributed "GPL 2 or later." Rightfully so, too, only a moron would distribute under a license they haven't read.
"BTW: pi's already have BTRFS."
BTRFS is the most useless pile of steaming manure that has ever disgraced Linux with it's inclusion into the kernel tree. It's feature were _intended_ to rival ZFS but after years of development it has failed to even match the usability of ancient vanilla file systems like ext*.
It is also telling that EL7 will ship with XFS as the default FS rather than BTRFS.
If I didn't know better I might suspect that Oracle's continued pushing of BTRFS is nothing more than an attempt to dissuade people from using ZFS on Linux and thus assist them in pushing Solaris as having ZFS as the killer feature.
@frymaster,
"People who want it to be GPL2-compatible want it because then it can be included in the Linux kernel."
If the Linux kernel devs really want to use ZFS as is then surely all they need to do is to agree amongst themselves and change the license to one that facilitates that (rather than blocking it).
Ok, so there's a large number of kernel devs past, present and dead out there who'd all have to agree. And I dare say a few of them might be untraceable. However, for something such as ZFS that would apparently be a tremendous asset to Linux, surely it would be worth at least asking them (or their estate) the question? After all, who'd actually say no?
"Ok, so there's a large number of kernel devs past, present and dead out there who'd all have to agree. And I dare say a few of them might be untraceable. However, for something such as ZFS that would apparently be a tremendous asset to Linux, surely it would be worth at least asking them (or their estate) the question? After all, who'd actually say no?"
Linus.
Apples and oranges. Even if either came for free, only one can turn into orange juice.
It's not a bad thing at all that it isn't GPLv2 licensed; but that it's not licensed GPLv2-compatible (as BSD or LGPL would've been), and/or not dual-licensed, that limits applicability.
The result is that there's a great opensource filesystem with far far less traction than it deserves. If Sun wanted to make Linux developers envious by dangling all these nice technology carrots, they surely succeeded to a degree. But if you want to motivate contribution and/or use, inciting envy is more likely to result in the opposite.
> Is there anything at all of value from Oracle's embrace of Sun that hasn't forked off from under Ellison's
> thumb?
Maybe I'm still in the dark ages, but what about Virtualbox? So far I've not heard of any forks of that excellent virt solution. Kinda sad really, imo it's the most comprehensive hypervisor I've ever used. It truly deserves to be forked and set free from the hands of Ellison.
I get the feeling that the only reason for including this one is to gain popularity (or more attention), but quite frankly I don't see this easily working out. In my opinion ZFS is "superior by design" but even so; it is very demanding on your resources, especially memory. So I can't help wonder if working within a 512Mb limit is going to suffice here...
Still, I maybe cynical but I do hope they'll succeed nonetheless. Because if they can manage to lower the resource demands without compromising features then this could be good news for everyone using ZFS.
Indeed. I wish I could simply use ZFS as a standard between all my boxes instead of having to resort to FAT32 or weird VM skipping to stuff files on NTFS. Currently I can do so with ZFS with everything except Windows.
I wish I could simply use ZFS as a standard between all my boxes instead of having to resort to FAT32 or weird VM skipping to stuff files on NTFS. Currently I can do so with ZFS with everything except Windows.
That's nuts, you still put hard disks in your windows machines? Spin up a zvol on one of your storage boxes and serve it up over iscsi, install windows on that. The FS windows sees will still be NTFS, but you can take snapshots of the underlying zvol, shrink/expand the zvol, etc.
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