On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 07:51:58AM -0700, Chuck Munro wrote: > I have a question that has been puzzling me for some time ... what > is the reason RedHat chose to go with btrfs rather than working with > the ZFS-on-Linux folks (now OpenZFS)? Is it a licensing issue, > political, etc? > > Although btrfs is making progress, ZFS is far more mature, has a few > more stable features (especially Raid-z3) and has worked flawlessly > for me on CentOS-6 and Scientific Linux-6. I used ZFS for a couple > of large file servers with no problems. The only annoying part was > having to manually install the kernel module each time a kernel > update was issued. > > Because FreeBSD has built-in drivers for LSI cards (I use JBOD mode) > and strong ZFS support, I've switched to FreeNAS with it's default > native ZFS and driver support for LSI. I would have preferred to > stick with CentOS, but FreeNAS just made things easier to manage. > It also seems about twice as fast as ZFS on Linux (same hardware), > but that may simply be a tuning issue. > > Is there any chance that a native ZFS (rather than btrfs) will ever > emerge in RHEL/CentOS? Just curious, because I'd love to return to > CentOS/SL next time I build large file servers. > > As an aside, I have used only WD Black and WD RedPro drives for > RAID, and not had any issues. Green drives are scary :-) > > Chuck Licensing, IMO. Redistributing ZoL is likely fraught with a bit of legal peril, or at best, technical peril if you want to try and skirt the legal edges. Oracle is notoriously litigious and having a target liked Red Hat would probably have their lawyers whetting their chops. Ironically, btrfs was also an Oracle thing -- in that Chris Mason worked for them (believe he's now at Google?). Do agree that ZFS feels like what btrfs is trying to become. I use ZoL on some production boxes and its been quite stable, but am also considering the approach you've taken with FreeNAS for some larger deployments to chase after a bit more performance and tighter integration with the OS... Ray