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by AsyncAwait 2254 days ago
There's absolutely no evidence for this. On the other hand, there's some evidence that Sun made ZFS licensing explicitly non-compatible with the GPL, so as to not "sabotage" Solaris.

Linux has other efforts going on in this area, including Btrfs and Bcachefs - there's also ZoL, of course.

1 comments

Take a look at any of Greg Kroah-Hartman's comments on patches that screw up ZFS.

One of the biggest ones was removing exports of kernel functions that ZFS used for encrypted datasets: https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=154689892914091

I'm fine with this sort of stuff in general assuming it doesn't affect LTS, but this specific patch was backported to LTS kernels even though it has nothing to do with security or bugfixes. I had several zpools I had to apply custom kernel patches on the machines for no other reason than because somebody is mad at licensing.

Bcachefs isn't even stable enough to use in production. Btrfs is okay, and I've used it before, but it's also a minefield of killing your data depending on what features you use. If you use all the features you need to make it on par with ZFS you may as well dump your data in the trash.

ZFS 'just works' and none of the features are incomplete or have asterisks attached that compromise data integrity. Yeah it has architectural problems, doesn't do stuff the Linux way, and has a license that makes devs angry. It's also never lost a byte for me in production for almost a decade of use.

I know the Linux devs don't owe me anything and I'm not really angry or anything about this. It's just a fact that it's frustrating to have to deal with political problems just to run a server.

You're just ignoring what I said above. Nobody is out to screw ZoL, but the kernel community doesn't care enough to maintain compatibility with it.

Why, as a kernel dev, would you care if there's no possibility of it ever being mainlined because of decisions Sun explicitly made to be hostile towards your project?

It's like trying to cozy up to someone who just punched me, not happening.

Bcachefs isn't yet up to parity for sure, but it is stable enough for everyday use and doesn't corrupt you data like Btrfs sometimes does. A stable foundation that gets expanded upon daily.