Linux community takes pride for something “Oracle” develops and maintain? And they will lose respect for Oracle if it abandons Btrfs? Why that injustice? It’s unfair!

If Linux community takes pride, then let them prove they deserve it by adopting Btrfs if Oracle abandons Btrfs. That’s justice!

It is very true that ZFS is gaining a significant share of popularity with the non-Windows crowd. And outside of the enterprise arena and into the end-user desktop, Microsoft still holds 87% of the market (numbers from Net Applications). The FAT file systems were so easy to adopt and have set as a commonly supported file system across all operating systems for at least three reasons:

1. Microsoft’s market share
2. Microsoft’s inability to understand the word “interoperability”
3. The usage of removable media preformatted with FAT32.

With that aside, I am sure that there are plenty of more reasons but those seem to be the ones that quickly come to mind.

While ZFS has been creeping its way onto other operating platforms such as BSD, Mac OS X (read-only), and Linux (over FUSE), it is still too bulky of an FS to function in every arena. Please do not misunderstand. I love ZFS and enjoy playing with it. Sun has done an excellent job in designing (and continuing to design) the FS. ZFS with all its features and functions is pretty resource hungry and will not apply to some of the smaller media devices; thus limiting its adoption. FAT32, while inferior, is lightweight which made it extremely easy to port and manage.

I see a strong future for ZFS on Solaris and BSD flavors of UNIX, but not on Linux (due to licensing). At one point in time one could have thought that there was more common ground with UFS on all of the non-Windows platforms, although each distribution has its own customized version catered to their operating systems.

Thank you for your comments.

Petros

Has anyone else considered the implication of ZFS gaining widespread support on Solaris, various flavors of BSD, Mac OS X, and Linux? For the first time, it would mean that every operating system being taken seriously except Microsoft’s had a common filesystem with advanced capabilities that each OS understands natively.

Currently the best we have for a common interchange is fat32. Seriously, the best we can come up with for a common denominator is fat32?

What about Zones vs VServer?

You are correct. What is currently in production will remain in production until you can safely convert from the one file format to another (which you mentioned): http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Conversion_from_Ext3

This is a huge advantage to continue with the development of Btrfs!

He is correct. There is absolutely no way the Linux developers
are going to bother adding support for a new file system without
putting a lot of effort into integrating it into Linux proper.

This means eliminating code redundancy, getting the coding style
matching up to Linux standards, shoving as much functionality
into the Linux-VFS stuff as much as possible. That sort of thing.

When they integrate features into the kernel it must be done
correctly. _ESPECIALLY_ for file systems. The Linux developers
have been burned before by simply shoehorning driver code into
the kernel without putting a lot of effort into proper
integration.

And with file systems the Linux developers are especially
conservative. Why? Becuase it’s very difficult for people to
upgrade their filesystems. Once you have people using a file
system then their data is going to be stuck there for the longest
time.. you will have a very difficult time being able to
efficiently remove the data from a important system, reformatting
the file system, and then having that data replaced.

——————–

Anyways everybody needs to stop buying into Sun’s bullshit. ZFS
is nice and it has a lot of features that make it desirable, but
it’s not God’s gift to file systems. ZFS is just one of the very few
features that Solaris has over Linux. Dtrace is the other big one…
Other then that, not much.

There WILL be better file systems that come along and I think
that Btrfs is going to be one of them.

Why?

Btrfs supports most of the features that ZFS has and other Linux
file systems do not.

Btrfs is also going to be faster then ZFS. ZFS is nice, but it’s
not a very fast file system when compared to things avialable to
Linux.

There is a clear upgrade path for existing Linux users. Ext2 was
upgradable to Ext3. Ext3 is upgradeable to Ext4. And
Ext3/Ext4 (at least Ext3) will be upgradable to Btrfs.

Btrfs integrates better into the Linux kernel. It’s makes heavy
use of code that is already well tested and used by other file
systems. Improvements to itself often lead to improvements in
other portions of the kernel. ZFS, in comparison, is alien code
from a much different design basis.

Btrfs has optimized modes for solid state hardware. These modes
will not only improve write performance, but improve read
performance, and work to prolong the life of the solid state
hardware.

CRFS is ‘Coherent Remote File System’ for Linux. It is a
distributed file system under heavy development that uses BTFS
features for the daemon and uses BTFS for the on-disk format.

Navigate to Edit->Preferences->Content. Change the default font and get over it.

It is their implementation that makes them original. As was the case with Solaris when it had implemented their zones, dtrace to even ZFS. Sure the Linux kernel has adopted ideas here and there; as has every other OS. Believe it or not but the “delusion” that you allude to is the same “delusion” I hold for Solaris/OpenSolaris which is also the same “delusion” I hold for FreeBSD and so on. The pride that I speak of, is the pride that all the individuals involved (working as a team) on the Btrfs system have. Knowing that they are making a difference. Knowing that they are all striving to achieve the same goal. The goal of something that can bring change. I am sure this same sense of pride was felt by those who developed ZFS. Do we all remember what happened with EVMS when LVM was chosen in its place? I do not know what you do by profession, but this pride can go a long way in determining the quality and support of a product.