[OpenIndiana-discuss] BTRFS for OI, anyone?

[Hans J. Albertsson]

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-request at openindiana.org wrote:
> Message: 8
> Date: Wed, 09 May 2012 08:54:39 -0400
> From: James Carlson<carlsonj at workingcode.com>
> To: Discussion list for OpenIndiana
> 	<openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org>
> Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] BTRFS for OI, anyone?
> Message-ID:<4FAA690F.9000201 at 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 <carlsonj at workingcode.com>