Re: When will ZFS become stable?

On 04/01/2008, Brooks Davis <brooks_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 12:42:28PM +0100, Ivan Voras wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > As far as I know about the details of implementation and what would it
> > take to fix the problems, is it safe to assume ZFS will never become
> > stable during 7.x lifetime?
>
> I suppose that depends what you mean by stable.

My yardstick is currently "when a month goes by without anyone
complaining it crashed on him" :)

>It seems stable enough
> for a number of applications today.

This number is not so large. It seems to be easily crashed by rsync,
for example (speaking from my own experience, and also some of my
colleagues).

> It's possible some of
> the issues of memory requirements won't be fixable in 7.x, but I don't
> think that's a given.

I listened to some of Pawel's talks and devsummit brainstormings and I
get the feeling *none* of the problems can be fixed in 7.x, especially
on i386. I'm just asking for more official confirmation.

This is not a trivial question, since it involves deploying systems to
be maintained some years into the future - if ZFS will become stable
relatively shortly, it might be worth putting up with crashes, but if
not, there will be no near-future deployments of it.