[Soc-coordination] Status Report of ZFS on Linux Integration, Week 1

[Aron Xu]

Hi everyone,

This is the second report of ZFS on Linux Integration GSoC project. As
mentioned in my application, I've been busy working on my final exams
so only summary of my findings and progress are presented in this
report, details will follow soon on related mailing list as individual
discussions or reports.

During the past week, I've done:
 * License audit for Debian packages are finished, only trivial
changes are needed and they are already done on git.
 * Updated debconf templates and asked debian-l10n-english for review.
Will call for translations when finished.
 * spl is carefully checked and tested to be ready for upload, it is
something much easier to handle than zfs.
 * zfs initramfs support is disabled for now since after doing some
testing we are missing quite some bit in the archive before achieving
proper root filesystem support.

More explanations:

SPL is a porting layer LKM that implements a number of Solaris syscall
on Linux, which is written from the ground at LLNL and is licensed
GPL-2+. ZFS source is based on the code released in OpenSolaris by
Sun, and upstream is merging efforts from other OpenSolaris ports like
Illumos. Most of the code is licensed under CDDL-1.0 and does not link
with any GPL-only library, except some code related to ZPIOS which is
a heavily modified version of the original Lustre PIOS test code
(GPL). It does not link with CDDL licensed files and is safe to be
distributed in source form with CDDL licensed sources.

Current Git is based on the work by Darik Horn, who has already
developed a series of modified versions of software that can work on
user systems. We have to disable most of the deeper bits for now
because we need to wait related changes happen rather than pushing
something incompatible to user systems. My plan is that only non-root
installation will be supported in the first upload.

Things to do next week:

1. Testing of common usages of ZFS as simple storage purpose will be
worked on this weekend, to catch up a bit for the lag caused by my
exams.
2. Check with Grub2 upstream for zpool v5000 patch set, again.
3. Check with DKMS upstream for dependency support or something like-wise.
4. Start doing review of Turbo's branch about d-i support, which was
proposed earlier so that some merging work could be needed as well.

-- 
Regards,
Aron Xu