I was a bit surprised to see so much near-religious reactions....
James C is to be commended for his rational answer.
I was merely trying to find out if
A: BTRFS would be (easily) doable
B: BTRFS had any advantage at all, at least down the line, years away.
C: ZFS had any major wins over BTRFS that would make the Q moot.
Can someone comment in a tech way on B and C above??
I can think of one political/commercial reason for BTRFS: Oracle is
actually involved, and I guess ZFS technology might seep into BTRFS that
way, w/o hitting some sort of licensing wall or be too costly.
P.S.
I hear some people out there sing the BTRFS' praise, and that is people
whom I used to trust while at Sun.
I hear people praise the realtime and/or lowlatency properties of recent
linuxes, too, and I went ahead and tried, and THAT seemed quite
reasonable praise.
On 2012-05-09 14:54, openindiana-discuss-requ...@openindiana.org wrote:
Message: 8
Date: Wed, 09 May 2012 08:54:39 -0400
From: James Carlson<carls...@workingcode.com>
To: Discussion list for OpenIndiana
<openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org>
Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] BTRFS for OI, anyone?
Message-ID:<4faa690f.9000...@workingcode.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
>> Would BTRFS be a viable FS for Openindiana?
>
> btrfs is licensed under GPL, OpenIndiana mostly under CDDL, so that's a hard nut to crack. The harder one is still "who wants btrfs when you've got ZFS"
One good reason to do it would be to help users migrate from Linux to
OpenIndiana without losing data. Another would be to help out those
users who have multi-boot systems with both Linux and OpenIndiana, and
who don't want to resort to DOS file system hacks. Still another would
be to enable folks to build useful appliances with OpenIndiana --
consider the various Linux-based "rescue CDs" that allow you to boot up
a mini Linux on CD and read foreign file systems.
Just about any reasoning that applies to NTFS or another foreign file
system applies as well to btrfs.
As for the GPLv2, it's an interesting question, but I doubt it's
actually a problem. The license clearly calls out "identifiable
sections" and "mere aggregation" as exceptions in section (2) and that
redistribution of any btrfs changes doesn't require inclusion of normal
parts of the system in section (3).
I know that corporate lawyers tend to fear, distrust, and generally
loathe the GPL, which is why no GPL'd stuff ended up in the kernel when
Sun was in charge. As a completely artificial distinction, tons of
GPL'd code appeared in user space, and was used in key parts of the system.
I guess if the general consensus is to keep the (in my opinion
irrational) fear alive, distributing btrfs as a separate package from
the core system would be more than enough fig leaf.
-- James Carlson 42.703N 71.076W <carls...@workingcode.com>
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