Linux Foundation is organizing a end user collaboration summit this week. A major topic will be a presentation on the new upcoming filesystems - Ext4 and Btrfs. Ted Tso, who is a Linux kernel filesystem developer on a sabbatical from IBM working for Linux Foundation for a year, has talked about the two-pronged approach for the Linux kernel, taking a incremental approach with Ext4 while simultaneously working on the next generation filesystem called btrfs. Read more for details.
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Member since:2005-08-09
Member since:2005-07-13
even if Linux never gets ZFS I am still thrilled ZFS exists and is being developed and adopted by the BSD's and Apple. After all, if it wernt for ZFS Oracle likely wouldn't have said "me too" and started development on Btrfs. well, they liekly would have, though i don't think it would have been made as easily avalible. could have easily become a good piece of Oracle IP. glad its open though.
Member since:2008-04-15
That must be why i'm willing to stick to ext3/4 while i watch development of btfs.
All my zealous love for the gpl is blinding me to the truth that i truly truly want ZFS for my servers.
Member since:2007-09-08
The license issue with ZFS is Sun's fault. They deliberately chose a license that's incompatible with the GPL. That means that any combination of ZFS and the Linux kernel is impossible to distribute without violating both the GPL (on the Linux code) and the CDDL (on the ZFS code).
Did you really think that the Linux kernel developers were going to stop work, and devote all their time to tracking down all of the previous contributors to the kernel, ask them for permission to change the license to something else, and then relicense the entire thing under another license just so we can use ZFS? Most of the kernel contributors were one-off contributors who left no contact details, and a few of them are even dead.
Besides, ZFS would never be acceptable for the mainstream Linux kernel anyway. Like Reiser4, it re-implements far too many other filesystem layers, like the block cache, and has rampant layering violations. Most of the improvements from ZFS should be implemented into Linux itself, so that all filesystems can benefit from them. Of course, doing it that way isn't nearly as marketable - you can't just slap a single name on the whole thing and sell it.
Member since:2005-07-06
Hmmmmmm. Funny. My recollection is that Linux's usage of the GPL pre-dates both ZFS and the CDDL, and Sun knew fine well what it was doing when it started using the CDDL for selected bits of software.
Member since:2005-07-07
Hmmmmmm. Funny. My recollection is that Linux's usage of the GPL pre-dates both ZFS and the CDDL, and Sun knew fine well what it was doing when it started using the CDDL for selected bits of software. "
If Sun had used GPL, other OSes like MacOS, *BSD and QNX couldn't have ported ZFS or other Solaris tech. Sun chose a more open license to spread the tech around. Too bad Linux users are so selfish.
Edited 2008-10-14 15:53 UTC
Member since:
2006-10-20
Shame that license issues has blocked ZFS adoption in Linux distros. Typical that the Linux community is all about opensource as long as it came from them.