ZFS Hits an Important Milestone, Version 0.6.1 Released 99
sfcrazy writes "ZFS on Linux has reached what Brian Behlendorf calls an important milestone with the official 0.6.1 release. Version 0.6.1 not only brings the usual bug fixes but also introduces a new property called 'snapdev.' Brian explains, 'The snapdev property was introduced to control the visibility of zvol snapshot devices and may be set to either visible or hidden. When set to hidden, which is the default, zvol snapshot devices will not be created under /dev/. To gain access to these devices the property must be set to visible. This behavior is analogous to the existing snapdir property.'"
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And so does btrfs.
Re:ZFS need Linux maturity (Score:4, Informative)
ZFS runs great on FreeBSD as well.
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It does, with a few caveats: namely, you need to have one of about 3 disk controllers to make it stable. That's the biggest one. And preferably, run it from something which has been specifically designed for ZFS, like FreeNAS instead of as 'freebsd' itself, since that's just a moving target...
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The ve
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How long ago did you try it? I had similar problems very briefly when I tried it at around 0. 5.8 I believe. Performance is much better now.
Personally, I've got 3 ZoL systems here at home: a Phenom II x3 with 16GB of RAM (which is my main VM host), an AMD Bobcat with 8GB (storage/backup mainly), and an AMD XP 3200+ with 8GB of RAM (secondary/failover VM host) - all run virtualization extensions, and of the half dozen VMs which are getting used regularly (and another 8 which are always on serving various net
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In December with whatever was current then I had the system that just could not cope under linux with ZFS and then I reinstalled it as freebsd. I've got a another linux ZFS system that is running OK but it never gets to work hard. It fine so long as there are not a lot of things going on, but with only half a dozen users trying to read things off the same filesystem at once it slowed down to almost nothing. Maybe it would have been OK with more than 4GB (however the current on
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Attaching a non-rc version number... (Score:2, Informative)
does not a milestone make. Looking at this issue list - https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues - makes me wary to even consider zfs on linux for any serious work.
Kernel panics, deadlocks, data corruption; not really things you'd want.
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I've had 6 production ZFS servers under heavy load for over a year (FreeBSD 9.0-RC -> 9.1-RELEASE) without any problems. I've started building all of my new servers with root-on-zfs to start taking advantage of beadm (boot environments, lets you do a clone of your root file system, do an upgrade in a jail, then try booting off it, and then decide if you want to keep it, or roll back)
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Whoa! They've ported beadm to FreeBSD too? I feel stupid for not knowing it.
That tool is awesome. You can actually chose what version of the operating system you want to boot (from ZFS clones and snapshots) from the boot loader.
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Keep in mind that zfsonlinux is different than ZFS in *BSD, and any testaments to the stability of ZFS in *BSD are impertinent.
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Keep in mind that zfsonlinux is different than ZFS in *BSD, and any testaments to the stability of ZFS in *BSD are impertinent.
Or irrelevant. But true enough.
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If you haven't had some data loss with zfs testing, you haven't tested enough. Might I suggest a set of nice rare earth magnets?
http://www.magnet4less.com/index.php?cPath=1&gclid=CNGdmPCzorYCFYI-MgodL3YA5Q [magnet4less.com]
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File systems have version#? (Score:1)
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I suppose that FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT, ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs and reiserfs4 all confuse you already?
Actually, I think it's just a version on the driver.
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NTFS is also separately versioned on Windows, so this is not that uncommon.
So... I presume this is a file system. (Score:1)
That's the kind of information that could be mentioned in the summary.
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That's the kind of information that could be mentioned in the summary.
Isn't that kind of like saying articles about the sun should mention it's a star?
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Seriously? Is this how far we've fallen? Return your geek card at the door and never return.
I often agree with complaints about little-known acronyms, products, or projects not being explained in Slashdot summaries; but this? FFS!
Re:So... I presume this is a file system. (Score:5, Funny)
And this "FFS", this is also a file system? ( :P )
Re:So... I presume this is a file system. (Score:5, Informative)
And this "FFS", this is also a file system? ( :P )
Yes [berkeley.edu].
is that sarcasm? or lack of knowledge? (Score:1)
THe answer is yes, yes it is :p
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Fast_File_System [wikipedia.org]
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but this? FFS
No, this ZFS. FFS is much older and does a lot less.
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What's TFS? Another file system?
Yes [duke.edu].
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You know you are on slashdot, right?
Maybe this website is just not for you.
Not ZFS 0.6.1... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not ZFS 0.6.1... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:9000 (Score:2)
Depends on which ZFS (Score:5, Informative)
Version 5000 is used for community ZFS implementations that have feature flags (Illumos, BSD, and Linux).
If you're talking about Solaris, the current version is 34; any version past 28 comes after Oracle closed off Solaris. Note that beyond version 28, the community and Oracle ZFS pools are not interoperable.
Legal Issues? (Score:1)
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No. The issue is the license(CDDL) and GPL don't play together in a way that lets you ship CDDL software with GPL software (but the other way around is fine).
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Sort of, but it's different than you are thinking. Linux is licensed under the GPL 2, while ZFS is licensed under CDDL. Those two licenses are not compatible. Since the GPL is a distribution license, not a use license, there is nothing stopping you from using ZFS on Linux. However, you can't ship the two combined as you would then be violating the license. The practical effect is that you won't ever see a kernel implementation of ZFS ship with a Distro unless oracle relicenses ZFS. You'll have to download,
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Sort of, but it's different than you are thinking. Linux is licensed under the GPL 2, while ZFS is licensed under CDDL. Those two licenses are not compatible. Since the GPL is a distribution license, not a use license, there is nothing stopping you from using ZFS on Linux. However, you can't ship the two combined as you would then be violating the license. The practical effect is that you won't ever see a kernel implementation of ZFS ship with a Distro unless oracle relicenses ZFS. You'll have to download, compile, and install ZFS yourself for the Linux-based computers that you want to use it on. And that's perfectly legal within the scope of the licenses.
That is only an issue with monolithic kernels. Sabayon Linux and Gentoo Linux are currently shipping ZFS binary modules on their live media.
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It's also worth noting that the primary platform for ZFSonLinux is Ubuntu, where DKMS is used to dynamically compile the kernel module. I believe the same is true for most other distros that aren't source-based.
Translation: you add the repository and install the "zfs" package and it does everything for you. So installing ZFS is no more difficult than installing any other package, and the licensing issues are completely irrelevant to users.
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I wouldn't want to bet on that. Compiling and linking CDDL module source against the kernel's GPL source almost certainly creates a derived work (it's complicated but, in short: depends on whether it just uses header information or actually links in kernel code).
Distributing a CDDL source-code plus scripts package (e.g. a zfs-dkms package) which compiles the zfs kernel modules on the user's own machine as a result of the user's explicit action (i.e. to inst
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that's nice for you. I'm certain you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
you certainly don't know enough to be encouraging anyone to bet against an expensive lawsuit - which doesn't actually have to win in order to succeed, it just has to bankrupt you (in which case, it wins by default because you don't afford lawyers to defend yourself any more)
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A zfs-dkms module package is also possible, which automates the compile and install of the kernel module.
There are un-official packages for ubuntu and debian already which do this (spl-dkms and zfs-dkms fo
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what is it about software licensing that brings out the nutcases?
fuck off back to under your rock, troll.
your loony conspiracy theories aren't needed, aren't helping and certainly aren't wanted.
Such important milestone and version number 0.6.1? (Score:1)
Why not labeling it 1.0? Looks like it is still in beta...
Why ZFS? (Score:2)
What are the advantages of ZFS over, say, ext4? If you have a low-memory machine and not a lot of storage, does it buy you anything?
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Snapshots, volumes, checksums, easy expansion, better drive management, shorter recovery time when the system crashes, etc etc etc. ZFS is so far ahead of ext4 they are in completely different fields. ZFS works well on low resource machines too. I use it on a small home server with 512MB of RAM and it's been running great for over a year.
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I get that - but why? Why is it worth the additional hassle?
Re:Why ZFS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Better data integrity? Checksums on all blocks means the OS can tell if data is corrupt, and the data can be seamlessly recovered from redundancy (typically parity from raidz or raidz2, which also doesn't have the raid5 write hole because ZFS is copy-on-write).
Easier to use? zfs management happens through the "zfs" and "zpool" commands which are generally much easier to work with than obscure necromancy commands required for traditional types of systems that make me care about cylinders and partitions.
More flexible? The storage pool method, where you build a pool of capacity and allocate filesystems out of it, gives you a great deal of flexibility and simplicity. I just keep adding more storage to my pool as required, either by adding more RAID arrays or increasing the size of disks in those arrays, and then I've got my primary filesystem for storage, I've got a deduplicated one I use for backups, and I've got a compressed one I use for long-term archives. And creating a new one like that takes about five seconds without having to repartition or reformat anything. Creating/deleting filesystems is about as much effort as creating/deleting files.
Easier snapshots? Snapshots are instant on copy-on-write filesystems. Any modification of data causes the block to be copied anyhow, so all a snapshot has to do is not delete older blocks.
ZFS is one of a handful of next-gen filesystems (along with BTRFS and HAMMER) that are so far beyond traditional filesystems that it's a really eye-opening experience using them. That's not to say ZFS is perfect, or that the ZFSonLinux implementation is perfect, but it's in a reasonable state of stability at this point, and the advantages that these new filesystems offer is substantial.
I do wish that ZFS had asynchronous deduplication like HAMMER, though. ZFS deduplication requires atrocious amounts of RAM (estimates go from 5 to 20 gigabytes of RAM per terabyte of deduplicated data), while HAMMER has effectively no extra memory required at runtime for dedupe, because it just scans the disk afterwards and does the deduplication after the fact, so it doesn't need to hold the full block table in memory at all times.
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I can't speak for Linux, but on FreeBSD it's no extra hassle. First, you don't need to think about partitioning, you just create a big zpool. You can restrict the size of filesystems within it, but they're not hard limits, so it's very easy to expand them. On the other hand, you do get the benefits of having different partitions (i.e. you can optimise them for different use cases, e.g. turning on compression and deduplication on a volume that you don't access much and turning them off in filesystems that
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You can get much of that if you add LVM to ext4, though.
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Snapshotting and portability is the biggest difference I can think of with ext4, everything else is pretty well comparing a LVM+ext4 bundle with zfs.
I'd say not, ZFS is not something I'd run on a machine with less than 2GB.
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I'd say not, ZFS is not something I'd run on a machine with less than 2GB.
It depends a lot on the size of the disk. The general rule of thumb for good performance with ZFS is 1GB of RAM for each TB of storage (more if you're doing dedup). I stuck ZFS (PC-BSD) on an old laptop I gave to my tango group to play music. It only had 1GB of RAM, but it only had 20GB of disk space, so it was completely fine, and it means that if they unplug it (the battery is dead) by accident without shutting down then they still have a consistent filesystem, and I could snapshot it in a known-good s
zfs hits an important milestone (Score:3)
ZFS Linux perhaps (Score:2)
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Consider that all three major ZFS platforms (Linux/FreeBSD/Illumos) are working on a common core that they all share, and that the lions share of ZFS development is coming from the Linux community. Perhaps the Linux ZFS community should not be dismissed so readily.
FreeBSD is a fantastic platform for ZFS, but considering that both FreeBSD and ZoL are pulling down new work all the time, it's not automatically more stable.