[Pkg-zfsonlinux-devel] Possible GSoC idea: ZFS on Linux integration

[Aron Xu]

Hi,

ZFS provides many more advanced features than any other filesystems
available to Linux users, and it's proven in production environment
for years. There is btrfs under heavy development to provide similar
functions, while the way is still quite long to go, at the same time
native ZFS on Linux (ZoL, [1]) is a low hanging food for users. To
achieve this target we have two things to do: make zfs actually work
on a Linux distribution; make it better integrated into the system,
pushing its higher-level functions more handy to end users. I believe
when btrfs is finally landed with most of planned features, it can
benefit a lot from such work.

There is no Linux distribution currently provide ZFS support so far,
and I would like to propose such a project to make Debian the first
project to integrate it.

As for license concerns, ZoL is distributed in the form of two Linux
kernel modules, spl and zfs. The first one is Solaris Porting Layer,
licensed under GPL-2+, providing a set of system calls that is
compatible to Solaris; and the other one is the actual stuff of ZFS,
licensed under CDDL. In this way, both of the modules can be legally
distributed using dkms or pre-built binary modules.


[1]http://zfsonlinux.org


-- 
Regards,
Aron Xu