Submitted by Following in the footsteps of DTrace, another major OpenSolaris feature is making its way to FreeBSD. FreeBSD developer Pawel Dawidek has announced a port of ZFS, Sun’s next generation filesystem. In just 10 days of work, Pawel already has ZFS filesystems mounted, with the ability to create files and navigate directories.
Pawel is a machine. Through the years I’ve seen more and more fixes and new features with his name attached somewhere.
This is excellent news, FreeBSD has been aching for both a nicer volume manager and some new filesystems for some time now.
very very cool !!!!!!
…this does lend a little more credibility to the rumor that Apple might port ZFS and make use of it.
not off topic at all, (at least to me)
I think ZFS, porting to freeBSD and to OSX would be really great. just think, one guy in 10 days got it working at a basic level. imagine what a team of guys could do?
-Nex6
Yes! That is exactly what I was thinking! Of course, one really code engineer beats a team of so-so engineers…
There are other issues with ZFS than simply porting it over to the kernel.
Legacy application support, user interface tools (as much as I’m sure Apple would simply plop users in front of ‘zpool’, I think they’ll want to GUI is up a wee bit), plus overall system integration, ZFS root volues and upgrading old filesystems — in place thankyouverymuch.
Mind, assuming that they have support from Sun, and that they have already started on a port doesn’t preclude it from happening, and I think everyone would like to see ZFS, well, pretty much everywhere! But whatever this guy manages to get done porting ZFS to BSD (and kudos to him for his progress and success), Apples case is more involved than that.
I can easily see ZFS appearing for Mac OS X Server, and appearly quickly as an also ran file system option, with better integration for desktop Mac OS X coming later.
Finally, not to take anything away from this guys work, we should acknowledge Sun in first thier releasing of the code and also in the apparent quality of the code that lets someone quite unfamliar with it make as much progress as he has in just 10 days.
ZFS is allready part of Leopard(OSX), they call it timemachine. checkout http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2006/08/is-linux-being-left-behind.html for a link and multimedia presentation to it.
There is no evidence that TimeMachine is based on ZFS. That’s pure conjecture at this point in time.
John Siracusa at Ars thinks otherwise. Time Machine isn’t ZFS. Anyway, it’s a good read. Check it out: http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2006/8/15/4995/p2 .
Edited 2006-08-22 19:22
Yes. Good points.
I would be very happy with being able to use the same filesystem on both my FreeBSD and OS-X machines…
Oh because it’s CDDL’ed Linux devs won’t touch it ?
I don’t know whether it would/could appear in the kernel, but apparently it’s possible to mount a ZFS partition using Fuse.
Interesting question. It’s not a matter of “won’t” touch it, of course. It’s a matter of “can’t” touch it. I like GPL. But sometimes it is a damned pain.
However, it is unlikely that ZFS could ever make it into the mainline kernel regardless of licensing. As Andrew Morton put it, ZFS is “a rampant layering violation”. (I should add that despite the negative sound of that statement, he was actually praising ZFS’s overall feature set.)
Compared to ZFS, Reiser4 looks like a shoe-in. (RAID in the filesystem layer? Mon Dieu!)
ZFS looks like a great filesystem, with some features that may well make their way into ext4, eventually.
But ZFS itself may not be such a great fit for Linux for a number of reasons.
Edited 2006-08-23 01:46
I just blogged about this and how it effects Linux a few minutes ago, you can check out the link at http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2006/08/is-linux-being-left-behind.html
There is in fact a google SoC project to bring ZFS to FUSE, but I’m uncertain as to its progress. See http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/eschrock?entry=ztest_on_linux for reference.
for Linux status of ZFS,
http://zfs-on-fuse.blogspot.com/2006/08/zfs-on-linux-status.html
http://www.wizy.org/wiki/ZFS_on_FUSE
Just FYI
[quote]
Status
This project is currently in Phase 4 – Implementation of the ZPL (ZFS Posix Layer) through FUSE.
[/quote]