Native ZFS on linux!

devilmouse

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Mar 28, 2010
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http://github.com/behlendorf/zfs

Still all sorts of stupid licensing stuff to work out I imagine, but it ought to be much better than the FUSE port!

edit: Nevermind, there's an entry in the FAQ:

What about the “licensing” issue?

In a nutshell, the issue is that the Linux kernel which is licensed under the GNU General Public License is incompatible with ZFS which is licensed under the Sun CDDL. While both the GPL and CDDL are open source licenses their terms are such that it is impossible to simultaneously satisfy both licenses. This means that a single derived work of the Linux kernel and ZFS cannot be legally distributed.

One way to resolve this issue is to implement ZFS in user space with FUSE where it is not considered a derived work of the kernel. This approach resolves the licensing issues but it has some technical drawbacks. There is another option though. The CDDL does not restrict modification and release of the ZFS source code which is publicly available as part of OpenSolaris. The ZFS code can be modified to build as a CDDL licensed kernel module which is not distributed as part of the Linux kernel. This makes a Native ZFS on Linux implementation possible if you are willing to download and build it yourself.
 
Yes, or the kFreeBSD project would incorporate ZFS; then you can have ZFS on Ubuntu as well; as you would be (really) running the FreeBSD kernel on Ubuntu, which is what the kFreeBSD project is. In essence, it will be Ubuntu BSD and not Ubuntu Linux anymore. ;-)

If you only knew the power of the dark side... :D
 
Very interesting. I've compiled everything (with a few issues, due to everything being RHEL-specific), but I'm now missing a library called "libspl.so.0". Damn. Looks like I'll have to keep hunting.
 
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