[Soc-coordination] Status Report of ZFS on Linux Integration, Week 3

[Aron Xu]

Hi everyone,

This is the fourth report of ZFS on Linux Integration GSoC project.
What I have done this week:
1. Start conversations with DKMS and Grub2 maintainers.
2. Work on binary-deb/binary-udeb support of spl.
3. Check possible solutions on better auto-mounting.

First, I've summarized my ideas with concerns about dkms and sent to
its maintainer, and pinged grub2 maintainer for his comment about the
needing patches (most notably the zpool v5000 patch and feature flag
patch).

Second, it took quite some time to try about how to get binary modules
built with module-assistant, but it appears to be complicated to
create and test another flavor of rules for building the package on
user's system. As part of reviewing the branch from Trubo, I decided
to do improvement based on his work, and this is what we have now,
again, tested to build and run. Such work is only done for spl-linux
right now, and most of it can be easily duplicated to zfs, which I'll
look next week (or this Sunday).

Also I tried to see if there is better way of auto-mounting based on
what we have in Debian, and it seems using an initscript is still the
most concrete way to do. I've verified the initscript works fine with
sysvinit and systemd in Debian, but the testing wasn't very complete
(just covers very common cases).

As a side note, zfs-linux's debconf has gotten translated to 7 languages so far.

Next week I'll first to see if I need to upload a new version of
spl-linux to experimental to bring binary-deb/binary-udeb stuff to the
archive. Then I'll zfs-linux's binary-deb/binary-udeb support. This
may cost some time to finish as there is unusual dependency
relationship between spl and zfs, but if it gets done quickly I'll try
to get initramfs work.

-- 
Regards,
Aron Xu