On 3/12/18, Eli Schwartz via arch-general <arch-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 03/11/2018 10:00 PM, Carsten Mattner via arch-general wrote:
>> I'm happy to hear that. My rationale is based on past observations
>> of needlessly heated arguments and ZFS, due to its license splitting
>> the Linux community in half, appearing to be perfect fuel for such
>> a thread.
>>
>> Thanks for the wiki links. Never used ZFS on Linux because I avoid
>> out of kernel patches. Maybe I will give it a try on Linux as well.
>
> Well yes, the main reason people get heated about it I think is because
> it is out-of-tree kernel modules and as such are less reliably stable or
> some such.
>
> Based on how well archzfs keeps their binary repos up to date, I'm not
> 100% convinced on the stability. Moreso consider that it's difficult to
> bootstrap a system without zfs available, and if their binary repo does
> not match the current archiso...
I'll stay away from it, thanks. I saw that Alpine Linux has good ZFS
support, but I didn't do anything serious with it. When it comes to
filesystems, I'm conservative, EXT4 and XFS on Linux. It's a pity
there's no modern filesystem to share volumes between FOSS kernels.
It's all some compromise that you might or might not accept.
My current recommendation if one is looking for ZFS:
(1) FreeBSD good enough, no linux binaries needed? Go with that.
(2) illumos derivative work for you in terms of drivers _and_
you need Linux binaries to run seamlessly? illumos lx branded
zones are your solution then. You can even dtrace a linux zone
from the illumos outer environment. It's like FreeBSD Jails
on steroids without the immaturity and chaos of Linux containers.
Crossbow is nice, too.
Keep in mind both 1 and 2 start off with a desire to use 1st class
native ZFS support. illumos #1 problem is the unneeded distro
fragmentation when the community is so small anyway. But they're
collaborating on the base and core system very well. The main issue
is porting or writing drivers. To this day I wonder why Google for
all of its Java language reliance didn't buy Sun liberate it fully.
Past fights over the language and Apache Java might have led Sun
to block any Google talks.
