[LUAU] ZFS (Zettabyte File System) blogfest....

[Jim Thompson]

So the code for ZFS has been released and is "Open", but not "Free" (its 
licensed under the SCDL).
For those of you wondering what ZFS is, here's a collection of links.  
Its all pro-Sun, of course.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmc?entry=welcome_to_zfs

A port to linux is "being investigated":
http://www.sun.com/emrkt/campaign_docs/expertexchange/knowledge/solaris_zfs_gen.html#10

ZFS was primarily designed for deployment in an enterprise environment 
where performance and scalability are extremely critical. It was 
engineered with a totally different set of assumptions focused on 
managing a huge amount of storage, so comparing it to other contemporary 
filesystems like Reiser would probably not be a good use of time.

That said, a lot of the 'features' found in ZFS are not innovative 
per-se, and the kernel-userland interface is a bit gross (but who reads 
the source these days?)   Not sure how to define a good interface to LVM 
for dynamically sizing partitions ... no problem, just hack the entire 
LVM into the FS. Not sure how to put checksumming in the block layer to 
give reliable storage ... no problem, just hack parts of the block layer 
into the FS.   Parts of ZFS appear to be a huge layering hack to me, but 
as I said, who reads the source these days?

For the true hardcore linux user, most of what ZFS and Solaris provide 
in terms of innovation can be replicated in Linux with a bit of 
fiddling: a lot of what ZFS does can be done with md and lvm, zones are 
like vserver  (plus Linux also has UML and Xen, though Xen should be 
coming to Solaris too).

Still, ZFS is a package that is advertised to work well. With its 
self-healing capabilities and support for a new high-reliability data 
replication model called RAID-Z, a Linux port of ZFS could potentially 
become a very popular choice for commodity file servers in Enterprise 
environments, but the benefits of ZFS on a desktop Linux system are 
debatable.