On Wednesday, January 31, 2024 6:56:47 PM CET Rich Freeman wrote: > On Wed, Jan 31, 2024 at 12:40 PM Thelma <the...@sys-concept.com> wrote: > > If zfs file system is superior to ext4 and it seems to it is. > > Why hasn't it been adopted more widely in Linux? > > The main barrier is that its license isn't GPL-compatible. It is > FOSS, but the license was basically designed to keep it from being > incorporated into the mainline kernel.
Which isn't as much of an issue as it sounds. You can still add it into the initramfs and can easily load the module. And the code still works with the functions the kernel devs pushed behind the GPL-wall if you simply remove that wall from your own kernel. (Which is advisable as it will improve performance) > The odd thing is that right now Oracle controls both ZFS and btrfs, > with the latter doing mostly the same thing and being GPL-compatible, > but it hasn't tended to be as stable. So we're in a really long > transitional period to btrfs becoming as reliable. After all this time, I have given up on waiting for btrfs. As mentioned in my other reply, it's still nowhere near reliable. > ZFS also cannot be shrunk as easily. I think that is something that > has been improved more recently, but I'm not certain of the state of > it. Also, bootloaders like grub aren't 100% compatible with all of > its later features, and it isn't even clear in the docs which ones are > and aren't supported. So it doesn't hurt to keep /boot off of zfs. To make this easier, there is a compatiblity option when creating a new zpool. It's also listed in the zfs-kmod ebuild: - zpool create -o compatibility=*grub*2 ... - Refer to /usr/share/zfs/compatibility.d/*grub*2 for list of features. -- Joost
