Re: ZFS

[Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Thu, 3 Mar 2016, Aaron B. wrote:
> Yes, NetBSD has these, but it's a lot easier on ZFS. As an example, I 
> don't have to worry about shrinking or growing partitions, because they 
> are all pulling space from a common pool.

You are right and this is true. I wouldn't say it's "much" easier, but 
it's more coherent to me, too.

> I haven't used fss(4) yet, but ZFS snapshots appear to be a lot more 
> powerful. I use zfs clone and zfs send/recv extensively.

They are. I use send/recv and totally agree. I've run into significantly 
more limitations with fss(4).

> On the other hand, ZFS on anything other than Solaris has always felt 
> like a square peg in a round hole.

Agreed. I think that feeling will grow as ZFS's core code continues to 
drift.

> I think it makes a lot more sense to put energy into porting Hammer.

HAMMER is different, since it doesn't have volume management built-in. I 
actually like that, but then again I'm old and I've learned to love LVM in 
my attendance to the School of Hard Knocks. I still think the layered 
approach offers more flexibility without sacrificing too much usability. 
Another interesting thing about HAMMER vis-a-vis ZFS is that HAMMER has 
this ambitious scheme to be distributed and the master-slave code already 
works today (and I suspect will get more distributed and bad-ass). AFAIK, 
ZFS can't do that and has no plans to go distributed+clustered or anything 
like that. There is definitely something sexy about that idea/feature. It 
reminds me of Amoeba or Sprite ideas which sadly don't get much play 
anymore.

> This gets us a filesystem with a future that can be controlled and 
> guarenteed, as well as integrating cleanly.

Damn straight. Those are both Good Things[tm].

-Swift