Patching kernel sources for ZFS?

nonhuman · Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 3:55 am Post subject: Patching kernel sources for ZFS?

I suppose this may be the right forum for this...

So obviously there are a lot of people who would love to see ZFS support in the Linux kernel. Also quite obvious is that this is currently impossible, but only due to licensing issues. There's really no technical reason that this couldn't be done, especially as ZFS has already been ported for FUSE.

So why isn't there some unofficial patch to add ZFS support to the Linux kernel? They exist for btrfs, ext4, reiser4, and other technically unsupported filesystems.
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SeaTiger · Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 4:24 am Post subject:

Maybe because it is not ready for general use? I am not too sure about source tree code, but the blog(http://zfs-on-fuse.blogspot.com/) is not updated since Jan this year. Base on that post, zfs does not seems ready.

nonhuman · Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 4:28 am Post subject:

Ah, well that makes sense.

It just seems odd to me that there doesn't seem to be more interest in this. ZFS is working pretty well in FreeBSD, I've been running it for a while there and enjoying it. Considering the nature of Linux and of Linux users, it seems as though there ought to be more people trying to make it work regardless of licensing issues.
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gnomen · n00b Joined: 04 Sep 2005 Posts: 48

Maybe the proper "linux response" is btrfs

nonhuman · Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 4:07 pm Post subject:

True, but btrfs doesn't have the full featureset that ZFS offers. ZFS is also currently at a more mature stage of development. I'm highly interested in both, but currently feel more comfortable running ZFS under FreeBSD than I do running btrfs under Linux.
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yoshi314 · l33t Joined: 30 Dec 2004 Posts: 850 Location: PL

zfs is not being ported to linux because its licence is not compatible with linux's gpl2.

you can only use it in userspace via fuse, which is a workaround for licensing issues.

*bsd has more compatible license so they can use it in kernelspace.

there might be an unofficial patch, but linux kernel community is quite wary of possible licensing issues. so it would never make it into the kernel and be considered illegal, unless the license would change.
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Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

It's not just licencing issues IIRC.

I read somewhere that the kernel takes a very layered approach through hardware access, volume management and filesystem access.
This has the advantage that you can mix lots of things, but ZFS cuts almost right through those almost to bare metal, which the Linux kernel isn't currently built for.

I'm under the impression that some potentially dangerous re-tooling would need to be done to the current branch in order to implement ZFS.

re. licencing 'tho; Wouldn't putting GPL3-only code on BSD taint the BSD kernel?

Naib

nonhuman · Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 5:53 pm Post subject: