ZFS License and Future

[Chad Perrin]

On Sat, Nov 06, 2010 at 06:52:19PM +0000, krad wrote:
> 
> the main problem is geom and ufs isnt a like for like replacement yet. Good
> as though geom is it just not as easy as zfs from an adminsistration point
> of view in my opinion. It may potentinally get a block checksum class but it
> will be a long time before its like for like.

I have not really spent any quality time with ZFS, so I'm a little
sketchy on the details.  Is there anything the checksumming capabilities
of ZFS do that cannot be duplicated with an external tool -- perhaps
something like a filesystem integrity auditing system?


> 
> I've had a play around with btrfs, which is supposed to be an opensource
> equivelent to zfs. It is far from ready yet though. It may mature into a
> good product in the future, but its a long way off and far from polished
> (dam horrible from what ive seen so far). Most of its development was backed
> by oracle though from what i have read, so who knows where that will go now.
> If oracle want to continue to push linux and it to have a decent fs, it may
> well just be easier for them to drop the licensing issues with cddl which
> was preventing zfs from making it into linux. Who knows but for anything in
> the near to medium future there is nothing to rival zfs on the opensource
> market.

As far as I'm aware, btrfs has not been ported to any BSD Unix systems,
either -- so there's a major downside to btrfs (as compared with ZFS).


> 
> Having said all that it really depends on whether you need the extra
> features of zfs. Personally I cant see how anyone with any important data
> can do without checksuming.

I guess that depends on what you're doing with the data and what kind of
external tools you have in place to protect/duplicate it in case of a
problem.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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