← Back to context

Comment by jjcm

1 day ago

What is the current state of ZFS? I know it had some licensing issues traditionally, despite it being a delight to use every time I've tried it. Is it back?

5 comments

jjcm

Reply
gh02t  1 day ago

Never went away, Linux is now the primary target platform for OpenZFS (which is basically synonymous with ZFS these days). TrueNAS/iXSystems (probably the main commercial company using ZFS) moved from FreeBSD to Linux. Major new features like pool expansion have been added after years of requests. Etc., it's a good time for ZFS on Linux.

There ARE licensing issues related to shipping it compiled into the kernel, but you can install it as a kernel module on every mainline distro nowadays which is functionally the same from a user perspective.

  • irusensei  3 hours ago

    Still sucks that you need to verify if your kernel update is compatible with the external module.

alphager  1 day ago

ZFS on Linux works great, but with most distributions, it will compile the kernel module on device upon installation. Only Ubuntu distributes binaries.

As a consequence, you don't necessarily want a rolling distro, as the ZFS module can get out of sync with the kernel.

ZFS itself is build for both BSD and Linux from the same source, so there's feature parity there.

hoherd  1 day ago

I've been using ZFS on linux for like... 14 years now? I've migrated through centos, ubuntu, and debian during that time and the zpools never had any issues that weren't hardware related.

ZFS is my favorite filesystem. I even use it on single drives because its snapshots and online data integrity checking are so great.

I even use it on single spinning rust USB drives. Zero problems.