Linus Torvalds says “Don’t use ZFS”—but doesn’t seem to understand it

Enlarge / Linus Torvalds is eminently qualified to discuss issues with license compatibility and kernel policy. However, this does not mean he's equally qualified to discuss individual projects in project-specific context. (credit: Getty Images)

Last Monday in the "Moderated Discussions" forum at realworldtech.com, Linus Torvalds-founding developer and current supreme maintainer of the Linux kernel-answered a user's question about a year-old kernel maintenance controversy that heavily impacted the ZFS on Linux project. After answering the user's actual question, Torvalds went on to make inaccurate and damaging claims about the ZFS filesystem itself.

Given the massive weight automatically given Torvalds' words due to his status as founding developer and chief maintainer of the Linux kernel, we feel it's a good idea to explain both the controversial kernel change itself, and Torvalds' comments about both the change in question and the ZFS filesystem.

The original January 2019 controversy, explained

In January 2019, kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman decided to disable exporting certain kernel symbols to non-GPL loadable kernel modules.

Read 26 remaining paragraphs | Comments