24 Jun
2008
24 Jun
'08
11:38 a.m.
On Jun 23, 2008, at 10:17 AM, Brad Parker wrote:
I've been drooling over Sun's "zfs"
lately, which seems to have
many of
the same features. But zfs is not gpl - worse, it appears to be
purposefully anti-gpl. Since Sun wrote it they can do as they please,
but it seems a shame to lock it out of linux (for me anyway).
"Non-GPL" doesn't automatically mean "non-good", my friend. ;)
I
see no good reason why it shouldn't be made available for (but not
built into or distributed with) Linux.
Word on the street is that zfs is *very* resource
intensive and
best run
in 64 bit kernels, but that when run the pool and self repairing
features
make it very easy to administer.
In the context of Solaris, I run only SPARC hardware, which
implies 64 bits for current releases of Solaris. I haven't taken any
hard numbers, but file operations on ZFS do feel considerably faster
than those on UFS, on a very busy system. I'm not sure where the
(relative) bottleneck is with UFS, as this is just from observation,
not controlled scientific tests: moving my high-activity directories
(database filesystem, mail queues and spools) to ZFS made my systems
noticeably more responsive.
That said, though, I have no doubt that it's burning some CPU to
get that additional filesystem performance.
I'd be curious to hear if anyone is using zfs for
long term
archival and
how they feel about being glued to solaris to use it. (aside: I
used to
be a serious solaris weenie back in the day, so I'm a fan, but linux
just became so much more practical at some point)
I've been using it for day-to-day production for some time. I hit
some bugs in very early releases (no loss of data though), but they
were squashed pretty quickly.
I generally prefer hardware RAID, because I have better things for
my CPUs to be doing, but I am completely sold on ZFS. The ease of
management, the speed, and the corruption detection are all big deals
for me.
(and I must say, somewhat amusedly, that I run Solaris instead of
Linux because it's so much more practical! ;))
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL