Re: [zfs-discuss] carrying on [was: Legality and the future of zfs...]
Andrej Podzimek wrote: 1) Btrfs does not have mature and user-friendly command-line tools. AFAIK, you can only list your snapshots and subvolumes by grep'ing the tree dump. ;-) I haven't looked closely at the btrfs commands recently, but from what I've seen, they're really amazingly ugly. The worst sort of parameter-ridden, fiddly, picky, completely non-mnemonic unix commands. And I think that's a huge, huge drawback - more than most people think. The traditional hacker mindset is to leave such nicities as usable commands to last, if ever. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to use! seems to be the philosophy. I think that attitude really misses the point that even geeks are humans too, and even experienced unix admins hate really complex commands. I, for one, can say without a doubt that the simplicity and elegance of the ZFS commands was one of the major selling points. Might I have eventually been persuaded to use ZFS based just on its features alone? Maybe. But I would have been dragged kicking and screaming, not wanting to learn Yet Another Set of Incomprehensible Commands. If I had started reading the man page and immediately been lost in a sea of parameters and sixteen different interrelated commands, I wonder if I would even have bothered pursuing it, or if I would have just put it in the could be interesting, maybe I'll look at it someday category. One of the main reasons I love ZFS so much is because I hated Veritas so much, and one of the reasons I hated Veritas so much was because doing even the smallest thing required a cheat sheet ten pages long. I never really felt like I got Veritas - I just followed cryptic recipes given to me by other people. But ZFS... I grok ZFS. Partly because of its design elegance, partly because the volume manager layer is gone, but largely because I can understand the commands. I'll never forget the excitement I felt when I saw the video of at opensolaris.org demonstrating how simple the commands were. I'll never forget how happy I was when I tried it the first time and, damn - it worked! *That* easy! I was ecstatic. If btrfs doesn't *seriously* brush up its commands, I'll probably be very resistant to learning it. At my age and with my level of free time, learning another super-complex set of computer commands just isn't exactly high on my list. But I do have a great idea of how to improve the situation. Here's my suggestion for btrfs: First, rename it BFS and just get rid of the silly, clumsy acronym and fudged pronunciation. No one cares that it's it's b-tree or whatever. Second, and most importantly, BFS should STEAL ZFS'S COMMND SYNTAX, AS VERBATIM AS POSSIBLE. Why not? It's already well-designed and easy. Lots of people already know it. Copyright? Well, the ZFS license might have technical issues with the code itself, but I don't think there would be any legal restriction to simply stealing the names of the commands and their syntax. Rename zpool to bpool, rename zfs to bfs, and - voila! the problem of arcane syntax is gone. I can't see Oracle dragging anyone into court and trying to sue for copying some command syntax. OK, of course I realize it wouldn't be that simple and that a fair amount of coding would be involved. But it would be interface and parsing code, not the heavy-duty black magic. More-junior developers could handle it while the more senior ones kept working on functionality. That's my idea, and I think it's brilliant. :) My $0.02. Doug Linder -- Learn more about Merchant Link at www.merchantlink.com. THIS MESSAGE IS CONFIDENTIAL. This e-mail message and any attachments are proprietary and confidential information intended only for the use of the recipient(s) named above. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not print, distribute, or copy this message or any attachments. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender by return e-mail and delete this message and any attachments from your computer. ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] carrying on [was: Legality and the future of zfs...]
On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 12:57:40AM +0200, Richard Elling wrote: Because of BTRFS for Linux, Linux's popularity itself and also thanks to the Oracle's help. BTRFS does not matter until it is a primary file system for a dominant distribution. From what I can tell, the dominant Linux distribution file system is ext. That will change some day, but we heard the same story you are replaying about BTRFS from the Reiser file system aficionados and the XFS evangelists. There is absolutely no doubt that Solaris will use ZFS as its primary file system. But there is no internal or external force causing Red Hat to change their primary file system from ext. Redhat Fedora 13 includes BTRFS, but it's not used as a default (yet). F13 also supports yum (package management) rollback using BTRFS snapshots. I'm not sure if Fedora 14 will have BTRFS as a default.. RHEL6 beta also includes BTRFS support (tech preview), but again, not enabled as a default filesystem. Upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 will use BTRFS as a default. That's the status in Linux world, afaik :) -- Pasi ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] carrying on
Giovanni Tirloni gtirl...@sysdroid.com wrote: On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 10:19 PM, Miles Nordin car...@ivy.net wrote: IMHO it's important we don't get stuck running Nexenta in the same spot we're now stuck with OpenSolaris: with a bunch of CDDL-protected source that few people know how to use in practice because the build procedure is magical and secret. This is why GPL demands you release ``all build scripts''! I don't know if the GPL demands that but I think we've all learned a lesson from Oracle/Sun regarding that. The missing requirement to provide build scripts is a drawback of the CDDL. ...But believe me that the GPL would not help you here, as the GPL cannot force the original author (in this case Sun/Oracle or whoever) to supply the scripts in question. Releasing source code and expecting people to figure out the rest could be called open source but it won't create the kind of collaboration people usually expect. As mentioned above, there is no license that can help you here. The OpenSource definition frm the OSI is a general guidline that contains rules to decide whether a license is free enough to get the OSS sticker. For any fork (or whatever people want to call it, there are many shades of gray) to succeed, the release and documentation of the build/testing infrastructure used to create the end product is as important as the main source code itself. I'm not saying Oracle/Sun should have released all and everything they used to create the OpenSolaris binary distribution (their product). I'm saying they should have first stopped treating it as a proprietary product and then released those bits to further forster external collaboration. But now that's all history and discussing about how things could have been done won't change anything. You unfortunately cannot enforce the author or Copyright holder I hope that if we want to be able to move OpenSolaris to the next level, we can this time avoid falling into the same mouse trap. This is a community issue. Do we have people that are willing to help? Jörg -- EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin j...@cs.tu-berlin.de(uni) joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] carrying on [was: Legality and the future of zfs...]
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 3:31 PM, Pasi Kärkkäinen pa...@iki.fi wrote: Upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 will use BTRFS as a default. Though there was some discussion around this, I don't think the above is a given. The ubuntu devs would look at the status of the project, and decide closer to the release. ~Anil PS : Unless I missed any recent announcement by Ubuntu.. ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] carrying on
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 7:12 AM, Joerg Schilling joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de wrote: Giovanni Tirloni gtirl...@sysdroid.com wrote: On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 10:19 PM, Miles Nordin car...@ivy.net wrote: IMHO it's important we don't get stuck running Nexenta in the same spot we're now stuck with OpenSolaris: with a bunch of CDDL-protected source that few people know how to use in practice because the build procedure is magical and secret. This is why GPL demands you release ``all build scripts''! I don't know if the GPL demands that but I think we've all learned a lesson from Oracle/Sun regarding that. The missing requirement to provide build scripts is a drawback of the CDDL. ...But believe me that the GPL would not help you here, as the GPL cannot force the original author (in this case Sun/Oracle or whoever) to supply the scripts in question. I don't have any doubts that the GPL (or any other license) would not prevent the current situation. It's more of a strategic/business decision. I hope that if we want to be able to move OpenSolaris to the next level, we can this time avoid falling into the same mouse trap. This is a community issue. Do we have people that are willing to help? Yep! Just need a little guidance in the beginning :) -- Giovanni Tirloni gtirl...@sysdroid.com ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] carrying on [was: Legality and the future of zfs...]
Ubuntu always likes to be on the edge even if btrfs is far from being 'stable' I would not want to run a release that does this. Servers need stability and reliability. Btrfs is far from this. Well, it seems to me that this is a well-known and very popular „circle in proving“: A: XYZ is far from stability and reliability. B: Are you sure? Have you had any serious issues with XYZ? Are there any failure reports and statistics? What are you comparing XYZ with? A: How can I be sure? I cannot give XYZ a try, because it is so far from stability and reliability... I run ArchLinux with Btrfs and OpenSolaris with ZFS. I haven't had a serious issue with any of them so far. (Well, in fact I had one issue with OpenSolaris in QEMU, but that's a well-known story, probably not related to ZFS: http://www.neuhalfen.name/2009/08/05/OpenSolaris_KVM_and_large_IDE_drives/.) As far as Btrfs is concerned, I am perfectly satisfied with it, as far as performance and features are concerned. On the other hand, Btrfs still has quite a lot of issues that need to be dealt with. For example, 1) Btrfs does not have mature and user-friendly command-line tools. AFAIK, you can only list your snapshots and subvolumes by grep'ing the tree dump. ;-) 2) there are still bugs that *must* be fixed before Btrfs can be seriously considered: http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-bt...@vger.kernel.org/msg05130.html Undoubtedly, ZFS is currently much more mature and usable than Btrfs. However, Btrfs can evolve very quickly, considering the huge community around Linux. For example, EXT4 was first released in late 2006 and I first deployed it (with a stable on-disk format) in early 2009. Andrej smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] carrying on [was: Legality and the future of zfs...]
On 07/19/10 07:26, Andrej Podzimek wrote: I run ArchLinux with Btrfs and OpenSolaris with ZFS. I haven't had a serious issue with any of them so far. Moblin/Meego ships with btrfs by default. COW file system on a cell phone :-). Unsurprisingly for a read-mostly file system it seems pretty stable. There's an interesting discussion about btrfs on Meego at http://lwn.net/Articles/387196/ Undoubtedly, ZFS is currently much more mature and usable than Btrfs. Agreed, but it's not just ZFS, though. It's the packaging system, beadm, stmf, the whole works. A simple yum update can be a terrifying experience and almost impossible to undo. And updating to a major new Linux release? Almost as bad as updating MSWindows. Open Solaris as an administerable system is simply years ahead of anything else. However, Btrfs can evolve very quickly, considering the huge community around Linux. For example, EXT4 was first released in late 2006 and I first deployed it (with a stable on-disk format) in early 2009. But the infrastructure to make use of a ZFS-like manager simply isn't there. As a Linux and Solaris developer and user of both, I'd take Solaris any day and so would everyone I know. But going back to the original topic, the tea leaves seem to be saying that Oracle is interested primarily in Solaris as a robust server OS and probably not so much for the desktop where there realistically isn't going to be much revenue. But it would be a bad gamble if they lose a lot of mind-share. Legal issues over ZFS make it even worse. I get calls for help converting MSWindows applications and servers to Linux. ZFS and all the other goodies make a compelling case for Solaris (and Sun/Oracle hardware) instead but the uncertainties make it a hard sell. Oracle are you listening? ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] carrying on
On Mon, 19 Jul 2010, Joerg Schilling wrote: The missing requirement to provide build scripts is a drawback of the CDDL. ...But believe me that the GPL would not help you here, as the GPL cannot force the original author (in this case Sun/Oracle or whoever) to supply the scripts in question. There is also no GPL requirement for the scripts to work for anyone other than the person who wrote them. The only requirement is that they are what is normally used for development. Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer,http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] carrying on
ap 2) there are still bugs that *must* be fixed before Btrfs can ap be seriously considered: ap http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-bt...@vger.kernel.org/msg05130.html I really don't think that's a show-stopper. He filled the disk with 2KB files. HE FILLED THE DISK WITH 2KB FILES. Well, if there was a 50% overhead, then fine. That can happen. 80%? All right, still good... But what actually happened does not seem acceptable to me. It's more, ``you think you're so clever, but you're not, see?'' I'm not saying not to fix it. I'm saying it's not a show-stopper. I'm not saying it's a showstopper. I just don't think anyone could seriously consider a production deployment before this is fixed. Edward Shishkin is the maintainer and co-author of Reiser4, which has not been accepted into the kernel yet, despite the fact that many people have been using it successfully for years. (I am also one of the Reiser4 users and run it on some laptops I maintain.) So Edward's reaction is not surprising. ;-) It's like „hey! My stable filesystem stays out, but various experiments (EXT4, NILFS2, Btrfs, ...) are let in! How comes?“ Andrej smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] carrying on [was: Legality and the future of zfs...]
On 16/07/2010 23:57, Richard Elling wrote: On Jul 15, 2010, at 4:48 AM, BM wrote: 2. No community = stale outdated code. But there is a community. What is lacking is that Oracle, in their infinite wisdom, has stopped producing OpenSolaris developer binary releases. Not to be outdone, they've stopped other OS releases as well. Surely, this is a temporary situation. AFAIK the dev OSOL releases are still being produced - they haven't been made public since b134 though. -- Robert Milkowski http://milek.blogspot.com ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] carrying on [was: Legality and the future of zfs...]
From: zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org [mailto:zfs-discuss- boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of Pasi Kärkkäinen Redhat Fedora 13 includes BTRFS, but it's not used as a default (yet). RHEL6 beta also includes BTRFS support (tech preview), but again, Upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 will use BTRFS as a default. As of 3 days ago, although BTRFS is shipping with some OSes, it's not considered stable or production ready. Use it if you don't care about the data on your box or do regular backups. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.btrfs/6145 That being said, a lot of people are using it, generally without issue. I think the key summary here is: You should be ok as long as you backup regularly, and you're not using it in an environment where reliability is critical. One of the present drawbacks is that there is presently no fsck for btrfs. And it can't scrub or anything like that. If you get a filesystem error, it cannot be fixed. I wonder if Netapp is going to sue Linus? ;-) ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] carrying on
re == Richard Elling rich...@nexenta.com writes: re we would very much like to see Oracle continue to produce re developer distributions which more closely track the source re changes. I'd rather someone else than Oracle did it. Until someone else is doing the ``building'', whatever that entails all the way from Mercurial to DVD, we will never know if the source we have is complete enough to do a fork if we need to. I realize everyone has in their heads, FORK == BAD. Yes, forks are usually bad, but the *ability to make forks* is good, because it ``decouples the investments our businesses make in OpenSolaris/ZFS from the volatility of Sun and Oracle's business cycle,'' to paraphrase some blog comment. Particularly when you are dealing with datasets so large it might cost tens of thousands to copy them into another format than ZFS, it's important to have a 2 year plan for this instead of being subject to ``I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.'' Nexenta being stuck at b134, and secret CVE fixes, does not look good. Though yeah, it looks better than it would if Nexenta didn't exist. IMHO it's important we don't get stuck running Nexenta in the same spot we're now stuck with OpenSolaris: with a bunch of CDDL-protected source that few people know how to use in practice because the build procedure is magical and secret. This is why GPL demands you release ``all build scripts''! One good way to help make sure you've the ability to make a fork, is to get the source from one organization and the binary distribution from another. As long as they're not too collusive, you can relax and rely on one of them to complain to the other. Another way is to use a source-based distribution like Gentoo or BSD, where the distributor includes a deliverable tool that produces bootable DVD's from the revision control system, and ordinary contributors can introspect these tools and find any binary blobs that may exist. pgpf3OSDelKXh.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
