this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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I want to learn more about file systems from the practical point of view so I know what to expect, how to approach them and what experience positive or negative you had / have.

I found this wikipedia's comparison but I want your hands-on views.

For now my mental list is

  • NTFS - for some reason TVs on USB love these and also Windows + Linux can read and write this
  • Ext4 - solid fs with journaling but Linux specific
  • Btrfs - some modern fs with snapshot capability, Linux specific
  • xfs - servers really like these as they are performant, Linux specific
  • FAT32 - limited but recognizable everywhere
  • exFAT - like FAT32 but less recognizable and less limited
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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

ZFS is completely ridiculous. It's like someone actually sat down to design an intelligent filesystem instead of making a slightly improved version of what's already out there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

..and that's why Oracle fucked up the licensing on it. We are not allowed to have nice things.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Why though? AFAIK the CDDL totally allows us to have nice things. It's similar to MPL and considered a free software license by the FSF. Sure it's not GPL but it doesn't disallow us from changing ZFS, using it, even commercially.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I don't really understand why the linux community complains about the licencing. I'm sure openzfs overcame that. In the freebsd world it's native on root straight out of the box

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah there's no essential problems with it in itself as free open source software. Legally it doesn't seem compatible with the Linux kernel source code, as in you can't compile it into the kernel but it seems to be okay to load it as a binary module, prebuilt or built on demand.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Yet practically no distros support it out of the box

And on root? Can practically forget it

Sad

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Well Ubuntu is the most popular distro and it supports it out of the box. It's had experimental ZFS-on-root support since 2020. Unfortunately it needs more work to be to be promoted from experimental status. But yeah, I don't know of any other diatros supporting it on root out of the box. Which is sad.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I didn't mean the license. I meant, it was a "fuck you" from Oracle.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I feel your pain on the CDDL (although I think it is still considered a “free” license), and while I love to hate Oracle, I think the CDDL decision was originally Sun’s, even if Oracle could “free” it now to be GPL.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I don't 'love' to 'hate' Oracle. For much of my career it seems like they've gone out of their way to make things more difficult than they need to be. If I had to calculate how much time fighting with their projects cost me (compared to everything else), they'd be at the head of the list (with one more zero at the left of the decimal point than Microsoft).