Yesterday brought exciting news on the ZFS and Ubuntu fronts—experimental ZFS root support in the installer for Ubuntu’s upcoming interim release, Eoan Ermine. The feature appeared in the 2019-10-09 daily build of Eoan—it’s not in the regular beta release and, in fact, wasn’t even in the “current daily” when we first went to download it. It’s that new! (Readers wanting to play with the new functionality can find it in today’s daily build, available here.)
Ars takes a look at this feature that’s clearly in still in alpha.
Does this mean BTRFS has stalled? It was supposed to be ZFS but better (well, covered by the GPL)…
brtfs progress has been slow.
Simple usage of btrfs seem to mostly OK. But occasionally on the mailing list you still see emails like this:
https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-btrfs/msg93095.html
Which seems to suggest it does still fail some of the time.
Btrfs is deprecated by even redhat since 2017
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/YHOOGJWGKDFZ4KZEV3MLTCJTA3VKW2PS/?sort=date
Reading through the comments on the article, it’s apparent that BTRFS isn’t going anywhere – a few short years ago an article about ZFS on Ars would’ve been full of people saying how BTRFS would soon be the superior solution and ZFS was ultimately a dead end.
Now, I didn’t see a single comment supporting it over ZFS, and all the comments say the same thing – it’s fine for simple volumes on single disks, and using snapshots and maybe a couple other features, but anything more complex and it’ll eat your data. And, apparently it’s been that way for a while.
It’s telling that SuSE, arguably the biggest proponent and supporter of BTRFS, will default to XFS when creating anything more complex than a couple of volumes on a singe disk.
I wouldn’t say BTRFS is dead.
If you look at the BTRFS mailinglist archive you can see there are many more patches now than support/help requests by users.
This is both good and bad: I think the number of patches went up (actually fixing things and adding what is needed) and possibly the number of users went down.
And ZFS still has a big problem, no friends with the mainline Linux developers:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ZFS-On-Linux-5.0-Problem
Lennie,
Since I haven’t been following, can anyone say if they ever resolved the licensing issue?
I found these opinions:
https://ubuntu.com/blog/zfs-licensing-and-linux
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/
It seems ubuntu’s stance is that they’re pretty much going to ignore the GPL incompatibility because it’s a module, but this goes against the FSF stance that under the GPL binary code linked at runtime still needs to be GPL compliant. This is exactly with LGPL was created for to allow runtime linking, however linux is under the GPL and not LGPL. So if ubuntu’s interpretation is allowed to stand, that might significantly weaken the GPL supposing others start to apply the very same logic to other incompatible licenses… anyone have more info on this?
It means Ubuntu believes ZFS to be a better bet for Ubuntu. Reading more than that into it is unwise.