ZFS update

[Tom Metro]

For those interested in the status of Sun's ZFS filesystem being ported 
to Linux, the November Linux Journal had a bit on the topic in the "diff 
-u: What's New In Kernel Development" column:

"... Sun has released a read-only version of the filesystem under the 
GPL. This is pretty cool, but not as cool as if Sun had released the 
whole thing. A read-write version could be useful to anyone, but the 
read-only version will be useful really only to people who've been using 
Solaris. In its full form ZFS is a very interesting filesystem - it can 
handle multiple exabytes of storage, pools multiple block devices 
seamlessly together, checksums everything, and snapshots the history of 
all data changes on the filesystem.

"Alan Cox speculates that ZFS may be one of the only things keeping 
Solaris alive as an operating system, and that is why Sun doesn't want 
to GPL the full code. Even if a read-write version were open sourced 
though, there still are patents covering parts of ZFS, and those patents 
currently are being fiercely litigated bu Sun and NetApp. ...

"...Kevin Winchester has volunteered to port the read-only code to 
Linux... Ricardo Correia also is attempting to rewrite ZFS from scratch 
as a FUSE-based filesystem."

(The FUSE version has been mentioned on this list before.)

Anyone keeping up on the state of ZFS in OpenBSD? Or more specifically, 
FreeNAS?

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/