[Users] OpenVZ and ZFS excellent experience

Scott Dowdle dowdle at montanalinux.org
Mon Jan 12 15:33:03 PST 2015


Greetings,

----- Original Message -----
> > License issues of ZFS.
> > 
> > License issues is not an critical because installing of ZFS is
> > straightforward and do not require any deep integration to system or
> > kernel and work on almost any kernel.
> 
> OpenZFS and zfsonline people claim that it is perfectly valid to ship
> zfs binary kernel modules, see:
> 
> http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Talk:FAQ

Unless I misunderstood, they also say there that ZFS code can be merged into the Linux source tree... but that distributing a binary built from it would be a no-no.  They can say a lot of things but what really matters is how the distros behave.  So far almost no distros include ZFS kernel modules and related support packages... and (I believe) the reason is that they want to mitigate risk.  Quite a few ship the fuse-based ZFS stuff.  I believe the small handful of distros that do include ZFS support via kernel modules are located outside of the US.  With regards to OpenVZ it mostly matters what Red Hat does and clones.

I know Proxmox is a huge Debian fan... does Debian offer ZFS kernel modules and if not, why not?  How about Proxmox VE?

> You can link to libzfs. As example, see grub code. Grub is GPL and they link
> with libzfs. Do I miss something?

Again, are distros shipping grub2 with or without ZFS support?  I ask because I think I know the answer but I'm not sure. If ZFS as kernel module (since fuse isn't available at boot is it?) isn't provided by a distro, grub2 support for it probably isn't offered either.  I'm just guessing here.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]


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