Re: [zfs-discuss] Looking for 3.5" SSD for ZIL

[Richard Elling]

On Dec 25, 2010, at 10:19 AM, Khushil Dep wrote:
> "Friends don't let friends disable the ZIL" - right Richard? :-)
> 
> 

Or, if you care about your data enough to bother with RAID, don't 
disable the ZIL :-)
 -- richard

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[zfs-discuss] MTBF and why we care [was: A few questions]

[Richard Elling]

On Dec 21, 2010, at 3:48 AM, Phil Harman wrote:
> On 21/12/2010 05:44, Richard Elling wrote:
>> 
>> On Dec 20, 2010, at 7:31 AM, Phil Harman  wrote:
>>> On 20/12/2010 13:59, Richard Elling wrote:
 
 On Dec 20, 2010, at 2:42 AM, Phil Harman  wrote:
>> Why does resilvering take so long in raidz anyway?
> Because it's broken. There were some changes a while back that made it 
> more broken.
 "broken" is the wrong term here. It functions as designed and correctly 
 resilvers devices. Disagreeing with the design is quite different than
 proving a defect.
>>> It might be the wrong term in general, but I think it does apply in the 
>>> budget home media server context of this thread.
>> If you only have a few slow drives, you don't have performance.
>> Like trying to win the Indianapolis 500 with a tricycle...
> 
> The context of this thread is a budget home media server (certainly not the 
> Indy 500, but perhaps not as humble as tricycle touring either). And whilst 
> it is a habit of the hardware advocate to blame the software ... and vice 
> versa ... it's not much help to those of us trying to build "good enough" 
> systems across the performance and availability spectrum.

it is all in how the expectations are set. For the home user, waiting overnight
for a resilver might not impact their daily lives (switch night/day around for 
developers :-)

>>> I think we can agree that ZFS currently doesn't play well on cheap disks. I 
>>> think we can also agree that the performance of ZFS resilvering is known to 
>>> be suboptimal under certain conditions.
>> ... and those conditions are also a strength. For example, most file
>> systems are nowhere near full. With ZFS you only resilver data. For those
>> who recall the resilver throttles in SVM or VXVM, you will appreciate not
>> having to resilver non-data.
> 
> I'd love to see the data and analysis for the assertion that "most files 
> systems are nowhere near full", discounting, of course, any trivial cases.

I wish I still had access to that data, since I left Sun, I'd be pleasantly  
surprised if 
anyone keeps up with it any more.  But yes, we did track file system 
utilization on 
around 300,000 systems, clearly a statistically significant sample, for Sun's 
market
anyway.  Average space utilization is well below 50%.

> In my experience, in any cost conscious scenario, in the home or the 
> enterprise, the expectation is that I'll get to use the majority of the space 
> I've paid for (generally "through the nose" from the storage silo team in the 
> enterprise scenario). To borrow your illustration, even Indy 500 teams care 
> about fuel consumption.
> 
> What I don't appreciate is having to resilver significantly more data than 
> the drive can contain. But when it comes to the crunch, what I'd really 
> appreciate was a bounded resilver time measured in hours not days or weeks.

For those following along, changeset 12296:7cf402a7f374 on May 3, 2010
brought a number of changes to scrubs and resilvers.

>>> For a long time at Sun, the rule was "correctness is a constraint, 
>>> performance is a goal". However, in the real world, performance is often 
>>> also a constraint (just as a quick but erroneous answer is a wrong answer, 
>>> so also, a slow but correct answer can also be "wrong").
>>> 
>>> Then one brave soul at Sun once ventured that "if Linux is faster, it's a 
>>> Solaris bug!" and to his surprise, the idea caught on. I later went on to 
>>> tell people that ZFS delievered RAID "where I = inexpensive", so I'm a just 
>>> a little frustrated when that promise becomes less respected over time. 
>>> First it was USB drives (which I agreed with), now it's SATA (and I'm not 
>>> so sure).
>> "slow" doesn't begin with an "i" :-)
> 
> Both ZFS and RAID promised to play in the inexpensive space.

And tricycles are less expensive than Indy cars...

> There has been a lot of discussion, anecdotes and some data on this list. 
 "slow because I use devices with poor random write(!) performance"
 is very different than "broken."
>>> Again, context is everything. For example, if someone was building a 
>>> business critical NAS appliance from consumer grade parts, I'd be the first 
>>> to say "are you nuts?!"
>> Unfortunately, the math does not support your position...
> 
> Actually, the math (e.g. raw drive metrics) doesn't lead me to expect such a 
> disparity.
> 
> The resilver doesn't do a single pass of the drives, but uses a "smarter" 
> temporal algorithm based on metadata.
 A design that only does a single pass does not handle the temporal
 changes. Many RAID implementations use a mix of spatial and temporal
 resilvering and suffer with that design decision.
>>> Actually, it's easy to see how a combined spatial and temporal approach 
>>> could be implemented to an advantage for mirrored vdevs.
> However, the current implentation has difficulty finishing the job if 
> there's a steady

Re: [zfs-discuss] A few questions

[Tim Cook]

On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 11:23 PM, Richard Elling
wrote:

> On Dec 21, 2010, at 5:05 AM, Deano wrote:
>
>
> The question therefore is, is there room in the software implementation to
> achieve performance and reliability numbers similar to expensive drives
> whilst using relative cheap drives?
>
>
> For some definition of "similar," yes. But using relatively cheap drives
> does
> not mean the overall system cost will be cheap.  For example, $250 will buy
> 8.6K random IOPS @ 4KB in an SSD[1], but to do that with "cheap disks"
> might
> require eighty 7,200 rpm SATA disks.
>
> ZFS is good but IMHO easy to see how it can be improved to better meet this
> situation, I can’t currently say when this line of thinking and code will
> move from research to production level use (tho I have a pretty good idea ;)
> ) but I wouldn’t bet on the status quo lasting much longer. In some ways the
> removal of OpenSolaris may actually be a good thing, as its catalyized a
> number of developers from the view that zfs is Oracle led, to thinking “what
> can we do with zfs code as a base”?
>
>
> There are more people outside of Oracle developing for ZFS than inside
> Oracle.
> This has been true for some time now.
>
>
>

Pardon my skepticism, but where is the proof of this claim (I'm quite
certain you know I mean no disrespect)?  Solaris11 Express was a massive
leap in functionality and bugfixes to ZFS.  I've seen exactly nothing out of
"outside of Oracle" in the time since it went closed.  We used to see
updates bi-weekly out of Sun.  Nexenta spending hundreds of man-hours on a
GUI and userland apps isn't work on ZFS.

--Tim
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Re: [zfs-discuss] Long resilver time

[Richard Elling]

On Dec 21, 2010, at 8:18 AM, Jackson Wang wrote:
> Dear Richard,
> I am a Nexenta user and now I meet the same problem of the resilver spend too 
> long time. I try to find out solution from the link on your content that "zfs 
> set resilver_speed=10% pool_name" but the Nexenta without the property of 
> resiler_speed. How can I slove my issue on Nexenta? Please advise. Thanks!

In general, resilver will take as long as needed. If your resilver is going
very, very slow, then there could be other issues causing the slowness.
Has the system been logging error messages related to the I/O subsystem
during the resilver?
 -- richard

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Re: [zfs-discuss] A few questions

[Richard Elling]

On Dec 21, 2010, at 5:05 AM, Deano wrote:
> 
> The question therefore is, is there room in the software implementation to 
> achieve performance and reliability numbers similar to expensive drives 
> whilst using relative cheap drives?

For some definition of "similar," yes. But using relatively cheap drives does
not mean the overall system cost will be cheap.  For example, $250 will buy
8.6K random IOPS @ 4KB in an SSD[1], but to do that with "cheap disks" might
require eighty 7,200 rpm SATA disks.

> ZFS is good but IMHO easy to see how it can be improved to better meet this 
> situation, I can’t currently say when this line of thinking and code will 
> move from research to production level use (tho I have a pretty good idea ;) 
> ) but I wouldn’t bet on the status quo lasting much longer. In some ways the 
> removal of OpenSolaris may actually be a good thing, as its catalyized a 
> number of developers from the view that zfs is Oracle led, to thinking “what 
> can we do with zfs code as a base”?

There are more people outside of Oracle developing for ZFS than inside Oracle.
This has been true for some time now.

> Ffor example how about sticking a cheap 80GiB commodity SSD in the storage 
> case. When a resilver or defrag is required, use it as a scratch space to 
> give you a block of fast IOPs storage space to accelerate the slow parts. 
> When its done secure erase and power it down, ready for the next time a 
> resilver needs to happen. The hardware is available, just needs someone to 
> write the software…

In general, SSDs will not speed resilver unless the resilvering disk is an SSD.

[1] 
http://www.intel.com/cd/channel/reseller/asmo-na/eng/products/nand/feature/index.htm
 -- richard

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Re: [zfs-discuss] SAS/short stroking vs. SSDs for ZIL

[Richard Elling]

On Dec 25, 2010, at 5:37 PM, Ross Walker wrote:
> On Dec 24, 2010, at 1:21 PM, Richard Elling  wrote:
> 
>> Latency is what matters most.  While there is a loose relationship between 
>> IOPS
>> and latency, you really want low latency.  For 15krpm drives, the average 
>> latency
>> is 2ms for zero seeks.  A decent SSD will beat that by an order of magnitude.
> 
> Actually I'd say that latency has a direct relationship to IOPS because it's 
> the time it takes to perform an IO that determines how many IOs Per Second 
> that can be performed.

That is only true when there is one queue and one server (in the queueing 
context).
This is not the case where there are multiple concurrent I/O that can be 
completed
out of order by multiple servers working in parallel (eg. disk subsystems).  
For an
extreme example, the Sun Storage F5100 Array specifications show 1.6 million
random read IOPS @ 4KB.  But instead of an average latency of 625 nanoseconds,
it shows an average latency of 0.378 milliseconds.  The analogy we've used in 
parallel
computing for many years is "nine women cannot make a baby in one month."

> Ever notice how storage vendors list their max IOPS in 512 byte sequential IO 
> workloads and sustained throughput in 1MB+ sequential IO workloads. Only SSD 
> makers list their random IOPS workload numbers and their 4K IO workload 
> numbers.

The vendor will present the number that makes them look best, often without
regard for practical application... the "curse of marketing" :-)
 -- richard

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Re: [zfs-discuss] BOOT, ZIL, L2ARC one one SSD?

[Bill Werner]

Understood Edward, and if this was a production data center, I wouldn't be 
doing it this way.  This is for my home lab, so spending hundreds of dollars on 
SSD devices isn't practical.

Can several datasets share a single ZIL and a single L2ARC, or much must each 
dataset have their own?
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org
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Re: [zfs-discuss] SAS/short stroking vs. SSDs for ZIL

[Ross Walker]

On Dec 24, 2010, at 1:21 PM, Richard Elling  wrote:

> Latency is what matters most.  While there is a loose relationship between 
> IOPS
> and latency, you really want low latency.  For 15krpm drives, the average 
> latency
> is 2ms for zero seeks.  A decent SSD will beat that by an order of magnitude.

Actually I'd say that latency has a direct relationship to IOPS because it's 
the time it takes to perform an IO that determines how many IOs Per Second that 
can be performed.

Ever notice how storage vendors list their max IOPS in 512 byte sequential IO 
workloads and sustained throughput in 1MB+ sequential IO workloads. Only SSD 
makers list their random IOPS workload numbers and their 4K IO workload numbers.

-Ross

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS ... open source moving forward?

[Erik Trimble]

On 12/25/2010 12:16 PM, joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de wrote:

Erik Trimble  wrote:

I've read Joerg's paper, and I've read several of the patents in
question, and nowhere around is there any real code. A bit of

Netapp filed patents (without code) in 1993, I of course have working code for
SuinOS-4.9 from 1991. Se below for more information.

Joerg - your paper used to be available here (which is where I read it
awhile ago), but not anymore:
http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/wofs.ps.gz


I just re-looked, and I now remember that I got it from that URL via the 
Internet Archive (www.internet.org). It's still available at the URL 
above from 2001 at the Archive.




This address did go away in 2001 when the German government enforced
integration of GMD into Fraunhofer.

The old postscript version (created from troff) is here:

http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/wofs.ps.gz

A few years ago, a friend helped me to add the images that originally have been
created outside of troff and inserted the old way (using glue). Since 2006,
there is a pdf version that includes the images:

http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/WoFS.pdf


Is there a better location?  (and, a full English translation?  I read
it in German, but my German is maybe at 7th-grade level, so I might have
missed some subtleties...)

There is currently no English tranlation and as a result of the legal situation
in 1991, I could not publish the related implementation. Even getting the
SunOS-4.0 source code in 1988 in order to allow the implementation, was a bit
tricky. Horst Winterhoff (Chief Sun Germany and Sun Europe) asked Bill Joy for
a permission to give away the source for my Diploma Thesis. As a result of
this and the fact that there was no official howto from Sun for writing
filesystems, I was forced to keep the implementation unpublished (as for the
implementation of mmap() in wofs, I was forced to copy aprox. 100 lines from
the UFS code).
If the code you copied is currently still in the OpenSolaris codebase, 
then you're OK. But, the SunOS codebase is significantly different than 
the Solaris one, so I wouldn't automatically assume that you can publish 
that code.  Though, if your borrowing was restricted to the UFS 
implementation (and not the Virtual Memory/Filesystem caching stuff), 
your chances are good that it's still in the OpenSolaris codebase.



Since June 2005, I would asume that the situation is different and there is no
longer a problem to publish the WOFS source. If people are interested, I could
publish the unedit original state from 1991 (including the SCCS history for my
implementation) even though it looks a bit messy.
For at least historical reasons, that would be nice. Though, I don't 
want to offer legal advice as to the possibility of problems, 
particularly for someone outside the US system. :-)



I tried to verify whether the submission of the diploma thesis in 1991 is an
official publication and in theory it should be, as a copy is stored in the
univertity library. Unfortunately, the university library is uanble to find the
paper. There are however many people who could confirm that the development
really happened between 1988 and 1991.

If your thesis paper was available via Lexisnexis, then, it certainly 
should count as officially published for any legal system. If not, I 
suspect that different countries would have different standards for 
university thesis.



Maybe, it is a good idea to send a mail to someone from eff.org?

Jörg

Yup.  They'd be the right people to talk to.

--

Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop:  usca22-123
Phone:  x17195
Santa Clara, CA
Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800)

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Re: [zfs-discuss] Understanding Disk Errors

[Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk]

- Original Message -
> I am trying to understand the various error conditions reported by
> iostat. I noticed during a recent scrub that my transport errors were
> increasing. However, after a fair amount of searching I am unsure if
> that indicates a drive failure or not. I also have a lot of illegal
> request errors. Not sure if those are indicative of any sort of "real"
> failure.

with all those 'invalid' errors, I think I would have started off checking the 
backplane if you have such a thing. Looks like something is bad there.

Vennlige hilsener / Best regards

roy
--
Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk
(+47) 97542685
r...@karlsbakk.net
http://blogg.karlsbakk.net/
--
I all pedagogikk er det essensielt at pensum presenteres intelligibelt. Det er 
et elementært imperativ for alle pedagoger å unngå eksessiv anvendelse av 
idiomer med fremmed opprinnelse. I de fleste tilfeller eksisterer adekvate og 
relevante synonymer på norsk.
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS ... open source moving forward?

[Joerg Schilling]

joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (Joerg Schilling) wrote:

> Erik Trimble  wrote:
>
> > I've read Joerg's paper, and I've read several of the patents in 
> > question, and nowhere around is there any real code. A bit of 
>
> Netapp filed patents (without code) in 1993, I of course have working code 
> for 
> SuinOS-4.9 from 1991. Se below for more information.

Sorry for the sticky fingers: this of course should be SunOS-4.0.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
   j...@cs.tu-berlin.de(uni)  
   joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: 
http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS ... open source moving forward?

[Joerg Schilling]

Erik Trimble  wrote:

> I've read Joerg's paper, and I've read several of the patents in 
> question, and nowhere around is there any real code. A bit of 

Netapp filed patents (without code) in 1993, I of course have working code for 
SuinOS-4.9 from 1991. Se below for more information.

> pseudo-code and some math, but no full, working code.  And, granted that 
> I'm not a IP lawyer, but it does look like Joerg's work is prior art 
> (and, given that the standard is supposed to be what someone in the 
> industry would consider obvious, based on their knowledge, and I think I 
> qualify). Which all points to the real problem of software patents - 
> they're really patents on IDEAS, not on a specific implementation.  Who 
> the moron was that really though that was OK (yes, I know who 
> specifically, but in general...) should be shot.
>
> Copyright is fine or protecting software work, but patents?
>
> Joerg - your paper used to be available here (which is where I read it 
> awhile ago), but not anymore:  
> http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/wofs.ps.gz

This address did go away in 2001 when the German government enforced 
integration of GMD into Fraunhofer.

The old postscript version (created from troff) is here:

http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/wofs.ps.gz

A few years ago, a friend helped me to add the images that originally have been 
created outside of troff and inserted the old way (using glue). Since 2006, 
there is a pdf version that includes the images:

http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/WoFS.pdf

> Is there a better location?  (and, a full English translation?  I read 
> it in German, but my German is maybe at 7th-grade level, so I might have 
> missed some subtleties...)

There is currently no English tranlation and as a result of the legal situation 
in 1991, I could not publish the related implementation. Even getting the 
SunOS-4.0 source code in 1988 in order to allow the implementation, was a bit 
tricky. Horst Winterhoff (Chief Sun Germany and Sun Europe) asked Bill Joy for 
a permission to give away the source for my Diploma Thesis. As a result of 
this and the fact that there was no official howto from Sun for writing 
filesystems, I was forced to keep the implementation unpublished (as for the 
implementation of mmap() in wofs, I was forced to copy aprox. 100 lines from 
the UFS code).

Since June 2005, I would asume that the situation is different and there is no 
longer a problem to publish the WOFS source. If people are interested, I could 
publish the unedit original state from 1991 (including the SCCS history for my 
implementation) even though it looks a bit messy. 

I tried to verify whether the submission of the diploma thesis in 1991 is an 
official publication and in theory it should be, as a copy is stored in the 
univertity library. Unfortunately, the university library is uanble to find the 
paper. There are however many people who could confirm that the development 
really happened between 1988 and 1991.

Maybe, it is a good idea to send a mail to someone from eff.org?

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
   j...@cs.tu-berlin.de(uni)  
   joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: 
http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS ... open source moving forward?

[Erik Trimble]

On 12/25/2010 11:19 AM, Tim Cook wrote:



On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 1:10 PM, Erik Trimble > wrote:


On 12/25/2010 6:25 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:

From: zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org

[mailto:zfs-discuss- 
boun...@opensolaris.org ]
On Behalf Of Joerg Schilling

And people should note that Netapp filed their patents
starting from 1993.
This
is 5 years after I started to develop WOFS, which is copy
on write. This

still

In any case, this is 20 year old technology. Aren't
patents something to
protect new ideas?

Boy, those guys must be really dumb to waste their time filing
billion
dollar lawsuits, protecting 20-year old technology, when it's
so obvious
that you and other people clearly invented it before them, and
all the money
they waste on lawyers can never achieve anything.  They should
all fire
themselves.  And anybody who defends against it can safely
hire a law
student for $20/hr to represent them, and just pull out your
documents as
defense, because that's so easy.

Plus, as you said, the technology is so old, it should be
worthless by now.
Why are we all wasting our time in this list talking about
irrelevant old
technology, anyway?


While that's a bit sarcastic there Ned,  it *should* be the
literal truth.  But, as the SCO/Linux suit showed, having no
realistic basis for a lawsuit doesn't prevent one from being
dragged through the (U.S.) courts for the better part of a decade.



Why can't we have a loser-pays civil system like every other
civilized country?


-- 
Erik Trimble

Java System Support
Mailstop:  usca22-123
Phone:  x17195
Santa Clara, CA
Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800)



If you've got enough money, we do.  You just have to make it to the 
end of the trial, and have a judge who feels similar.  They often 
award monetary settlements for the cost of legal defense to the victor.


--Tim



Which is completely useless as a system. I'm still significantly 
out-of-pocket for a suit that I shouldn't have had to fight in the first 
place, and the likelihood that I get to recover that money isn't good 
(defense cost awards aren't common).  There's no disincentive to 
trolling the legal system, forcing settlements on those unable to fight 
a protracted suit, even if they're sure to win the case.


Using the US legal system as a business strategy is evil, pure and 
simple, and one all too common nowadays.



--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop:  usca22-123
Phone:  x17195
Santa Clara, CA
Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800)

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS ... open source moving forward?

[Erik Trimble]

On 12/25/2010 10:59 AM, Tim Cook wrote:



On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 8:25 AM, Edward Ned Harvey 
> wrote:


> From: zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org
 [mailto:zfs-discuss-

> boun...@opensolaris.org ] On
Behalf Of Joerg Schilling
>
> And people should note that Netapp filed their patents starting
from 1993.
> This
> is 5 years after I started to develop WOFS, which is copy on
write. This
still
>
> In any case, this is 20 year old technology. Aren't patents
something to
> protect new ideas?

Boy, those guys must be really dumb to waste their time filing billion
dollar lawsuits, protecting 20-year old technology, when it's so
obvious
that you and other people clearly invented it before them, and all
the money
they waste on lawyers can never achieve anything.  They should all
fire
themselves.  And anybody who defends against it can safely hire a law
student for $20/hr to represent them, and just pull out your
documents as
defense, because that's so easy.

Plus, as you said, the technology is so old, it should be
worthless by now.
Why are we all wasting our time in this list talking about
irrelevant old
technology, anyway?




Indeed.  Isn't the Oracle database itself at least 20 years old?  And 
Windows?  And Solaris itself?  All the employees of those companies 
should probably just start donating their time for free instead of 
collecting a paycheck since it's quite obvious they should no longer 
be able to charge for their product.


What I find most entertaining is all the armchair lawyers on this 
mailing list that think they've got prior art when THEY'VE NEVER EVEN 
SEEN THE CODE IN QUESTION!



--Tim

Well...

I've read Joerg's paper, and I've read several of the patents in 
question, and nowhere around is there any real code. A bit of 
pseudo-code and some math, but no full, working code.  And, granted that 
I'm not a IP lawyer, but it does look like Joerg's work is prior art 
(and, given that the standard is supposed to be what someone in the 
industry would consider obvious, based on their knowledge, and I think I 
qualify). Which all points to the real problem of software patents - 
they're really patents on IDEAS, not on a specific implementation.  Who 
the moron was that really though that was OK (yes, I know who 
specifically, but in general...) should be shot.


Copyright is fine or protecting software work, but patents?

Joerg - your paper used to be available here (which is where I read it 
awhile ago), but not anymore:  
http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/wofs.ps.gz


Is there a better location?  (and, a full English translation?  I read 
it in German, but my German is maybe at 7th-grade level, so I might have 
missed some subtleties...)


[As obvious as it is, it should be pointed out, I'm making these statements as 
a very personal opinion, and I'm certain Oracle wouldn't have the same one. I 
in no way represent Oracle.]

--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop:  usca22-123
Phone:  x17195
Santa Clara, CA
Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800)

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS ... open source moving forward?

[Tim Cook]

On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 1:10 PM, Erik Trimble wrote:

> On 12/25/2010 6:25 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>
>> From: zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org [mailto:zfs-discuss-
>>> boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of Joerg Schilling
>>>
>>> And people should note that Netapp filed their patents starting from
>>> 1993.
>>> This
>>> is 5 years after I started to develop WOFS, which is copy on write. This
>>>
>> still
>>
>>> In any case, this is 20 year old technology. Aren't patents something to
>>> protect new ideas?
>>>
>> Boy, those guys must be really dumb to waste their time filing billion
>> dollar lawsuits, protecting 20-year old technology, when it's so obvious
>> that you and other people clearly invented it before them, and all the
>> money
>> they waste on lawyers can never achieve anything.  They should all fire
>> themselves.  And anybody who defends against it can safely hire a law
>> student for $20/hr to represent them, and just pull out your documents as
>> defense, because that's so easy.
>>
>> Plus, as you said, the technology is so old, it should be worthless by
>> now.
>> Why are we all wasting our time in this list talking about irrelevant old
>> technology, anyway?
>>
>>
> While that's a bit sarcastic there Ned,  it *should* be the literal truth.
>  But, as the SCO/Linux suit showed, having no realistic basis for a lawsuit
> doesn't prevent one from being dragged through the (U.S.) courts for the
> better part of a decade.
>
> 
>
> Why can't we have a loser-pays civil system like every other civilized
> country?
>
>
> --
> Erik Trimble
> Java System Support
> Mailstop:  usca22-123
> Phone:  x17195
> Santa Clara, CA
> Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800)
>
>

If you've got enough money, we do.  You just have to make it to the end of
the trial, and have a judge who feels similar.  They often award monetary
settlements for the cost of legal defense to the victor.

--Tim
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS ... open source moving forward?

[Erik Trimble]

On 12/25/2010 6:25 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:

From: zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org [mailto:zfs-discuss-
boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of Joerg Schilling

And people should note that Netapp filed their patents starting from 1993.
This
is 5 years after I started to develop WOFS, which is copy on write. This

still

In any case, this is 20 year old technology. Aren't patents something to
protect new ideas?

Boy, those guys must be really dumb to waste their time filing billion
dollar lawsuits, protecting 20-year old technology, when it's so obvious
that you and other people clearly invented it before them, and all the money
they waste on lawyers can never achieve anything.  They should all fire
themselves.  And anybody who defends against it can safely hire a law
student for $20/hr to represent them, and just pull out your documents as
defense, because that's so easy.

Plus, as you said, the technology is so old, it should be worthless by now.
Why are we all wasting our time in this list talking about irrelevant old
technology, anyway?



While that's a bit sarcastic there Ned,  it *should* be the literal 
truth.  But, as the SCO/Linux suit showed, having no realistic basis for 
a lawsuit doesn't prevent one from being dragged through the (U.S.) 
courts for the better part of a decade.




Why can't we have a loser-pays civil system like every other civilized 
country?



--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop:  usca22-123
Phone:  x17195
Santa Clara, CA
Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800)

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS ... open source moving forward?

[Tim Cook]

On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 8:25 AM, Edward Ned Harvey <
opensolarisisdeadlongliveopensola...@nedharvey.com> wrote:

> > From: zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org [mailto:zfs-discuss-
> > boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of Joerg Schilling
> >
> > And people should note that Netapp filed their patents starting from
> 1993.
> > This
> > is 5 years after I started to develop WOFS, which is copy on write. This
> still
> >
> > In any case, this is 20 year old technology. Aren't patents something to
> > protect new ideas?
>
> Boy, those guys must be really dumb to waste their time filing billion
> dollar lawsuits, protecting 20-year old technology, when it's so obvious
> that you and other people clearly invented it before them, and all the
> money
> they waste on lawyers can never achieve anything.  They should all fire
> themselves.  And anybody who defends against it can safely hire a law
> student for $20/hr to represent them, and just pull out your documents as
> defense, because that's so easy.
>
> Plus, as you said, the technology is so old, it should be worthless by now.
> Why are we all wasting our time in this list talking about irrelevant old
> technology, anyway?
>



Indeed.  Isn't the Oracle database itself at least 20 years old?  And
Windows?  And Solaris itself?  All the employees of those companies should
probably just start donating their time for free instead of collecting a
paycheck since it's quite obvious they should no longer be able to charge
for their product.

What I find most entertaining is all the armchair lawyers on this mailing
list that think they've got prior art when THEY'VE NEVER EVEN SEEN THE CODE
IN QUESTION!


--Tim
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Re: [zfs-discuss] Looking for 3.5" SSD for ZIL

[Khushil Dep]

"Friends don't let friends disable the ZIL" - right Richard? :-)
On 24 Dec 2010 20:34, "Richard Elling"  wrote:
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS ... open source moving forward?

[Edward Ned Harvey]

> From: zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org [mailto:zfs-discuss-
> boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of Joerg Schilling
> 
> And people should note that Netapp filed their patents starting from 1993.
> This
> is 5 years after I started to develop WOFS, which is copy on write. This
still
> 
> In any case, this is 20 year old technology. Aren't patents something to
> protect new ideas?

Boy, those guys must be really dumb to waste their time filing billion
dollar lawsuits, protecting 20-year old technology, when it's so obvious
that you and other people clearly invented it before them, and all the money
they waste on lawyers can never achieve anything.  They should all fire
themselves.  And anybody who defends against it can safely hire a law
student for $20/hr to represent them, and just pull out your documents as
defense, because that's so easy.

Plus, as you said, the technology is so old, it should be worthless by now.
Why are we all wasting our time in this list talking about irrelevant old
technology, anyway?

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS ... open source moving forward?

[Edward Ned Harvey]

> From: zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org [mailto:zfs-discuss-
> boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of Martin Matuska
> 
> Hi guys, I am one of the ZFS porting folks at FreeBSD.

That's all really cool, and IMHO, more promising than anything I knew before.  
But I'll really believe it if (a) some non-oracle organization wins a similar 
case, or (b) a major player such as Apple picks up ZFS and doesn't get 
threatened with lawsuit.  This would include the (basically nonexistent) 
possibility that folks like Dell, IBM, and HP start seriously contributing to 
the open-source ZFS codebase.

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS ... open source moving forward?

[Joerg Schilling]

Martin Matuska  wrote:

> Tim Cook  cook.ms> writes:
>
> > You are not a court of law, and that statement has not been tested.  It is
> your opinion and nothing more.  I'd appreciate if every time you repeated that
> statement, you'd preface it with "in my opinion" so you don't have people
> running around believing what they're doing is safe.  I'd hope they'd be smart
> enough to consult with a lawyer, but it's probably better to just not spread
> unsubstantiated rumor in the first place.  
> > 
> > --Tim
>
> Hi guys, I am one of the ZFS porting folks at FreeBSD.
>
> You might want to look at this site: http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/
>
> There are three main threatening Netapp patents mentioned:
> 5,819,292 - "copy on write"
> 7,174,352 - "filesystem snapshot"
> 6,857,001 - "writable snapshots"
>
> You can examine the documents at: http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/documents.jsp

And people should note that Netapp filed their patents starting from 1993. This 
is 5 years after I started to develop WOFS, which is copy on write. This still 
is 2 years after a working WOFS implementation has been shown by me at the 
Techische Universität Berlin and 2 years after I published my Dimplma thesis 
for WOFS.

The most important part of a COW filesystem is to invent a method to reliably 
retrieve the most recent super block. The related invention in WOFS is from 
1989.

As WOFS was designed for WORM media, all super blocks stay available for ever 
and as a result, each "stable sync state" in WOFS could be called a "filesystem 
snapshot" that is created without costs. Being able to mount a snapshot 
different from the most recent one would no be more than 10 additional lines of 
code and is a trivial non-patentable extra effort.

As every "stable sync state" in WOFS is is an "equal snapshot", there is no 
special state in the most recent sync state that prevents other sync states 
from being written too.


I cannot see any invention from Netapp. They just reimplement prior art.

In any case, this is 20 year old technology. Aren't patents something to 
protect new ideas?

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
   j...@cs.tu-berlin.de(uni)  
   joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: 
http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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