On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 08:00:01PM +1100, Tim Connors wrote:
On Tue, 14 Feb 2012, Andrew McGlashan wrote:
I'm sure that BTRFS time will come, but it will likely be a while for me. I like ZFS, but the licensing issues worry me, as does the "Oracle ownership" situation.
Is btrfs much better in that regard, other than having a licence that is compatible with our kernel? (ZFS already was capital F-Free if you happened to run a compatible kernel. And is developed and owned by the same people).
btrfs is in the mainline kernel, so yeah it's much better from a linux licensing POV. OTOH, the only licensing issue with ZFS is that it is very unlikely to be part of the mainline kernel, because the CDDL is not compatible with the GPL. Oracle would have to relicense it with a BSD style license for that to happen, which seems pretty unlikely. it's only a (minor) problem for distributors. there's no problem with end-users building and installing zfs on linux...easy enough to do with dkms. (BTW, given that debian already distributes ZFS-FUSE and has a need for ZFS support in the Debian/kFreeBSD port, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see debian-installer support for zfsonlinux in the forseeable future. i don't think it's a big deal, as long as the installation of the ZFS modules wasn't by default but just a convenience feature to make it easier for people who want to install it anyway)
It certainly seems like BTRFS is something very much to look forward to and probably shouldn't be used for any kind of critical data or systems for some time -- although Oracle has committed to using production BTRFS in OL very soon.
Gee, given the filesystem pain we already have on our rhel and oel boxen, I'm sure I'd excite my colleagues by suggesting we stick with the New Shiny! defaults!
sysadmins *love* to be excited. especially sysadmins working on storage systems - that can get pretty boring so we need interesting events to brighten up our working day :) craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #28: CPU radiator broken