[geeks] the virtualization project

[Shannon]

On Sep 9, 2011, at 04:44 , Jonathan Groll wrote:

> On Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:17:01 -0400, Shannon <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
>> Not having ZFS is politically stupid of the Linux camp, but they do have
>> BRTFS which has a lot of the same features.
>>
>
> What is politically stupid? You can't add non-GPL code to the kernel.
> Really, this isn't a choice or fault of Linux.

Actually a lot of it was and continues to be their choice, and some of them
certainly pushed for it. Furthermore they (some of them anyway) actively work
to make it difficult to integrate or otherwise work with non-GPL code. They do
this well above and beyond merely complying with the license.

Therefore I find it perfectly valid to state that it is at least partially the
fault of Linux as a group that such problems exist.

> Also, not clear what bothers about Linux? Is it the GPL?

That's a good part of it, though as I said you can largely ignore it,
technically speaking.

> If not that, then surely it is a case of simply finding the correct
minimalist
> distro that packages software in a way that you prefer.

I didn't say minimalist, I said neat and well done... :)

My last NetBSD install was anything but minimalist, but even huge it was
clean, neat, and easy to maintain.

However, other OS have really neat goodies which deserve attention.

> Whilst it is true that one can't run ZFS on Linux, there are plenty of RAID
and
> journalling filesystem choices and alternatives.

Yes, but none of them offer what ZFS does except for BTRFS. I am a little less
confident in it and would prefer running BSD.

No I don't like the political implications of Oracle owning Solaris either.

FreeBSD is nice, but I do wish their package system didn't mix in /usr/local.
I think they should just use pkgsrc, and one day they might. Huge duplication
of effort there and a lot of that is also political.

Today I was looking at DragonFly BSD, and it has some neat features. It might
be a decent compromise.

It ditched a lot of the ugly parts of FreeBSD and uses pkgsrc, and the hammer
filesystem has a few ZFS inspired features, including CRC checking of data and
metadata. Might have to create a test server and try it out this week.






--
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com