[Soc-coordination] Final summary of ZFS on Linux integration project

[Aron Xu]

Hi everyone,

This is the final summary of ZFS on Linux integration project.

Looking at the whole project, the overall goal is accomplished with
direct and indirect help from different parties - ZoL project, D-I
community, and of course my mentor.

The ZoL packages for non-root installation is ready at the time around
mid-term and uploaded to official archive. spl-linux already accepted,
first attempt of zfs-linux is rejected due to packaging detail
problems and second attempt is still pending NEW review. And for
end-term the d-i media is available but official acceptance still need
more work to get around the license questions and d-i policies.

As for other goals of this project, zfs-auto-snapshot is ready to
upload, but waiting for zfs-linux package being accepted from NEW
queue. beadm isn't worked on because the work of d-i image takes a bit
longer than expected.

The remaining question for d-i official acceptance is the way of how
binary zfs kernel module can be handled. Upstream ZoL project said the
modules can be distributed legally in binary form but Debian's FTP
Team still haven't a decision. Even we have these modules in the
archive, it's still a question that D-I team does not accept
out-of-tree kernel module due to maintainability problem. It's
consensus in ZoL project that if it's easy enough then even some part
of the work cannot be integrated officially to make it work out of
box, user's manual intervention is still acceptable. So if we can't
make it directly in the images, we could let users build them and load
at run-time.

Thanks again for the help from all people, it's an amazing experience
to participate Google Summer of Code and working on a challenging
goal, I'll continue to work on it after this project.


Best Regards,
Aron Xu