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Does this mean we'll never get Solaris' ZFS open-source enough for Linux?

• blasdel 18y ago
  It actually makes it marginally more likely (Oracle's not going to be so worried about pissing off old anti-GPL Solaris engineers), but the license is the least of the problem. ZFS would have to be completely rewritten to ever make it into Linus's tree -- it's written for kernels that don't really have a VFS layer, so it implements its own, and the linux kernel devs are pretty anal about sharing implementations. Once you fixed all the VFS issues, you'd end up with essentially a BTRFS clone that uses ZFS's on-disk format. Incidentally, BTRFS's development is sponsored wholly by Oracle!
  • kmavm 18y ago
    I'm not sure it's fair to summarize the Linux community's complaint about ZFS as the latter being "written for kernels that don't really have a VFS layer." Solaris very much has a VFS layer, and ZFS plays with it. What's different about ZFS is that, from most storage stacks' perspectives, it is also a volume manager. Linux people claim this is a layering violation; ZFS' architects claim that integrating traditional functions of filesystems and volume managers let them innovate, e.g., by closing the RAID write hole.