Linux FUSE Port of “Open” Solaris ZFS

Because Sun unfortunately chose to create a new and GPL incompatible license for “Open” Solaris it is not legally possible to directly port their interesting ZFS filesystem ^[1] code into the Linux kernel, so any Linux kernel implementation would need to be a clean room rewrite under a GPL compatible license.

However, there is a way around this license incompatibility problem for filesystems by using the Linux Filesystem in UserSpace (FUSE) ^[2] project. It (as the name implies) allows a filesystem to run in user space rather than in the kernel, a system now used by many other filesystem projects ^[3] as an easy way of providing a filesystem paradigm for all sorts of wacky ideas (including filesystem access to Wikipedia through WikipediaFS ^[4]).

So the Google Summer of Code 206 project is sponsoring Ricardo Correia in Portugal to port ZFS from “Open” Solaris to FUSE ^[5] – he’s keeping a blog of his progress ^[6] too.

Ricardo writes:

I’m very pleased to announce that, thanks to Google, Linux will (hopefully) have a working ZFS implementation by August 21st, 2006.

Good luck to him – I’ve had a demo of ZFS on Alec’s ^[7] laptop and it looked quite snazzy – it’s kind of a fusion of an online resizeable filesystem & logical volume manager.