Can someone here on hn with more in deepth knowelege about ZFS commenting on why it is superior to EXT4 for example for file storage? Does each dir handle more children for example?
Last time I read here HN ZFS still seem have edge case bugs. Has it matured now? Why don't distro such as debian etc just ship ZFS as the default instead of ext4?
> Can someone here on hn with more in deepth knowelege about ZFS commenting on why it is superior to EXT4 for example for file storage? Does each dir handle more children for example?
I'll tell you why I use it: Built-in compression, and data checksums (so it can catch and potentially correct corruption). Both are extra useful on storage arrays.
> Last time I read here HN ZFS still seem have edge case bugs. Has it matured now?
The only significant bugs I've heard of in a long time are with encryption. Still not ideal, but not a show-stopper.
> Why don't distro such as debian etc just ship ZFS as the default instead of ext4?
(The following is an oversimplification; I'm not a lawyer, so take with grain of salt.) There is, or at least may be, a licensing conflict between ZFS under the CDDL and Linux under the GPLv2. Both good open source licenses, but it is at best unclear that it's legal to distribute binaries that mix code under the two licenses. This makes it at best really messy to distribute a Linux distro using ZFS. (The generally accepted solution is to compile on-device, since the problem only happens with binaries.)
Thank you for pointing out about the CDDL license. Encryption is not a show-stopper.
ZFS is a combination of actual file system like Ext4, LVM and MD (software raid) subsystems on Linux, with extra features on top which you unlock when these are a single system.
Due to licensing, it can't be included in Linux kernel directly, and so it's not seeing the same level of scrutiny like the rest of the kernel, but it is arguably used in production more successfully than btrfs (comparable feature set, in-kernel, but not maintained as well anymore).
I can only imagine the ZFS license is not free enough for Debian (not a rant).
the problem is less how free it is. as far as i know it is free enough. but the license is simply incompatible with the GPLv2 and therefore a combined program may not be distributed, because by distributing it you would violate the GPL license of the kernel.
Quit being a lazy bum and use a search engine to answer your questions.
I don't know, I find HN is one place were we can actually engage real humans conversation on these type of tech related questions. Human dialog is often something that can results in more interesting discovery. Don't think you can get that with agenatic RL question answers feed back loop between models.
It's not a particularly interesting set of questions, though. If you looked up the features of zfs you would find what it has the ext4 doesn't. There's hundreds of articles, written by humans, on it. There's nothing that someone is going to helpfully put in an HN reply to these questions that you couldn't find faster by literally copy and pasting them into google, ignoring the AI summary.