[CentOS] Native ZFS on Linux

Fri May 29 14:51:58 UTC 2015
Chuck Munro <chuckm at seafoam.net>

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