ZFS (also ext3 snapshots)

Bill McGonigle bill at bfccomputing.com
Fri Apr 20 14:06:32 EDT 2007


On Apr 20, 2007, at 13:01, Michael ODonnell wrote:

> Further adventures of ZFS, GPL and friends:
>
>    http://kerneltrap.org/node/8066

Thanks for the pointer, Michael.  I left this comment there:

> Several sources have suggested that Sun is likely to dual-license  
> OpenSolaris under GPL v3
>
>   http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2084284,00.asp
>
> if it likes what it sees once GPL v3 is done.
>
> OpenSolaris contains ZFS.
>
> If that happens, the GPL v3 confers patent protection promises. I  
> know Linux is unlikely to ever be re-licensed under GPL v3, but so  
> long as linking in GPL v3 code with a GPL v2 kernel is acceptable,  
> this will be a good outcome, as Linux won't get left behind in the  
> storage arena.
>
> Linux == Good, ZFS == Good. Linux + ZFS = 2*Good.

Michael continues:

> Also, did I hear somebody at last night's meeting refer to
> (what sounded like) an "ext3 snapshot" capability?  If so,
> is that anything beyond copying the raw bits of an active
> ext3 filesystem out from under a running kernel and hoping
> that journal-replay will keep it consistent?

I haven't seen it built in with ext3 but you can do that with LVM.   
Probably you should be mounting '-o data=journal' if you plan to do  
that.  It's theoretically slow, but several benchmarks have showed it  
to be faster for many tasks (some timing thing I didn't fully  
understand).  Empirically, I run all my own systems with data=journal  
and peppiness does not suffer.

-Bill

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