

Native port of ZFS for Linux - crankyadmin
http://github.com/behlendorf/zfs

======
ddrager
It makes sense that this surfaces 1 week after reformatting my Ubuntu box to
use OpenSolaris and native ZFS.

Also of note:

This ZFS on Linux port was produced at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory (LLNL) under Contract No. DE-AC52-07NA27344 (Contract 44) between
the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Lawrence Livermore National Security,
LLC (LLNS) for the operation of LLNL. It has been approved for release under
LLNL-CODE-403049.

~~~
cvg
I find it interesting that both LLNL and Sun employees are involved in the
port. Does Sun being directly involved help the case for it being used in
Linux?

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jws
Did the ZFS patents ever get sorted out? The US government needn't worry about
this, they have an exemption, but the rest of the world should care. Sun has a
truckload of patents on ZFS that, last I'd heard, they were not granting free
to ZFS users, and NetApp thought they had a patent on it as well, at least
enough to sue Sun.

~~~
jbronn
ZFS is released under the CDDL 1.0. The terms of the CDDL (§2.1) grant a "a
world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license" for any patent claims
"infringed by the making, using or selling of" ZFS now owned or later aqcuired
by Sun/Oracle.

Thus, typical ZFS users cannot be sued for infringing on the patents that
Oracle holds on ZFS technology. However, this does not preclude third-parties
(e.g., NetApp) from pursuing patent claims that they believe are infringed by
ZFS -- but this is just as true with any other technology (think MS suing
Garmin over FAT in Linux).

Liability for infringement on Oracle's ZFS patents is possible if a user does
not comply with the terms of the CDDL. For example, modifying the ZFS source
code and distributing it using a license other than the CDDL would be a breach
of the license terms (§3.1), and thus forgo any patent license. The Apache 2.0
license has similar terms regarding patent rights.

~~~
Confusion

      (think MS suing Garmin over FAT in Linux)
    

OT: That was TomTom, not Garmin

------
wazoox
I'd like to know how this could be legally redistributable, given the license
conundrum CDDL and GPLv2 make. Any idea?

~~~
wmf
ZFS is redistributable and Linux is redistributable; you just can't
redistribute the combination. So you'll have to download and install ZFS
separately.

~~~
ominous_prime
Thank you. I was looking for some discussion here, but everyone was just
spouting off about patents, and it being "illegal", which isn't the case.
OpenAFS has a similar license incompatibility, yet it's still very widely
used.

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lallysingh
Note that this is just a port of the OpenSolaris code base -- not a
reimplementation. CDDL copyrights, patents, etc., are still big considerations
before this can be used.

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zokier
Seems bit old, originating from 2008? Any notable progression lately?

~~~
nailer
It went nowhere. Linux distros and the mainline kernel are using btrfs, which
has a similar layer-spanning design as zfs but is btree based like Reiser
(which should make it faster).

Most features are done and you can install with btrfs out of the box today in
the RHEL 6 or Centos 6 betas.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs>

~~~
0bfuscat3
ZFS has the following that BTRFS doesn't * Deduplication - Huge in any
virtualization environment * Cache layer - Required for high IOPS * fsck -
BTRFS cannot fix itself * raid - BTRFS raid currently cannot repair itself and
current git of the latest linux kernel still has these isses as well as space
issues. I wouldn't trust BTRFS to store /dev/random

~~~
gxti
Good, because it's an experimental filesystem. Don't write it off completely
though, because all of those (except for "cache layer" -- wtf does that even
mean?) are planned.

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koenigdavidmj
They claim that they're legally free and clear, but a lot of the kernel devs
are of the view that kernel modules are derived works of the kernel and
therefore have to be GPL.

~~~
dmm
> therefore have to be GPL.

Nope, they just have to be compatible with the GPL. You could, for example,
release a kernel module under the BSD or ISC license and be in the clear. The
problem is that the CDDL is intentionally incompatible with the GPL.

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MikeCapone
Would love to see ZFS (or at least something better than HFS) on OS X. Anyone
has info on that? Anything in the pipeline?

~~~
X-Istence
Apple had one point had read/write support for ZFS, but it was pulled because
Sun at the time was not able to provide certain guarantees. There was an email
by one of the main guys in ZFS that said something to that effect.

As such ZFS on Mac OS X is a dead project.

~~~
wmf
Some work is still being done outside of Apple:
<http://code.google.com/p/maczfs/> Maybe it's an undead project.

------
pasbesoin
Just to note: The GitHub account user name is Brian Behlendorf.

~~~
crankyadmin
Not the Apache one... the other one! :D

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sramov
I tend to avoid complexities of any kind or form. As long as there's Slackware
and JFS, Linux will be sane.

