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ZFS on Linux - it's coming!

post #1 of 4
Thread Starter 
Read full article here:
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/it...l-1016851.html

Quote:


Developers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have cooperated with Oracle to port large parts of Solaris' ZFS file system to the Linux kernel. Their aim is to make the distributed Lustre file system available under Linux with ZFS.

This narrow target also explains why the Native ZFS for Linux port is incomplete. Lustre is able to directly use the ZFS DMU (Data Management Unit), which connects to the Storage Pool Allocator (SPA, storage hardware interface) rather than go through the ZFS Posix Layer (ZPL) which provides an interface for the operating system. The developers therefore have not ported the ZFS Posix Layer to Linux and this currently makes it impossible to mount ZFS volumes under Linux. However, other developers are apparently already working on the ZPL.

Native ZFS for Linux can be compiled with kernel versions up to 2.6.32; among the tested platforms are the 2.6.32 kernel in Fedora 12 and in the beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, as well as the 2.6.18 kernel in RHEL 5. The build requires the Solaris Porting Layer and a 64-bit Linux system.
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post #2 of 4
Lustre is currently available for OEL, RHEL, and SLES, and the source is available, too. I'm glad that you brought this up, because I've been looking for an open source distributed file system so I can set up multiple iSCSI initiators to the same target. If I could do that in linux with a ZFS backend, then I'll be *one happy camper*.
post #3 of 4
Does ZFS actually have any benefits over BTRFS?

I seem to keep hearing that people are abandoning ZFS because they think BTRFS will work just as well and without any of the (admittedly arguable) Sun/Oracle license issues.

I really don't follow this filesystem stuff, but from the sidelines, it seems like it's taking a reeeaaally long time to bring both of these filesystems to Linux.
post #4 of 4
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mac The Knife View Post

Does ZFS actually have any benefits over BTRFS?

I don't have first hand experience with either so far (on Solaris everywhere I have worked it's usually UFS for the OS disk and Veritas VxFS for the data, similary for Linux EXT3/ReiserFS for OS and VxFS and/or EXT3/ReiserFS for data, depending on size of partition and whether it's on SAN or local), but given that ZFS has been part of Solaris for about 5 years now I would consider it stable and therefore trustworthy.

BTRFS is only beginning to show up in Linux distros, so personally I wouldn't trust any valuable data to it for at least another couple of years, until all bugs have been ironed out.

I don't see the license issues of ZFS as a major obstacle, it should be possible for a distro to package up ZFS in such a way that it gets compiled during installation on the user's machine (sort of similar like dkms kernel module installation). This would avoid license issues of a full ZFS integration into the kernel source tree, therefore I'm looking forward to this ZFS port to Linux to be completed.
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