Response to Greg Black on ZFS & FUSE

Catching up on PLOA I noticed a posting from Greg Black bemoaning the lack of ZFS in Linux so I thought I should make a couple of quick points in response to it.

  1. The CDDL/GPL thing is just down to the fact that their requirements are incompatible (Sun based the CDDL the MPL), so you can’t mix that code. Just have to live with that.
  2. A major issue with ZFS is that there is ongoing patent litigation in the US between Sun and NetApp over it – it’ll be interesting to see what Oracle do when they finally take over Sun (assuming Sun doesn’t expire before the EU regulators comes to a decision on the takeover)
  3. ZFS-FUSE isn’t dead! Whilst Ricardo has stopped work another group has taken up the challenge and there is a new home page for it – http://rudd-o.com/new-projects/zfs – complete with Git repository (no more Mercurial, huzzah!).
  4. The ZFS-FUSE mailing list is active too, if you want to learn more.

6 thoughts on “Response to Greg Black on ZFS & FUSE

  1. Interesting followup. I had failed to find the newer work on fuse-zfs despite looking, so it was good to learn about that. I’ve had a look at it and it seems like it will be worth watching, although it doesn’t seem quite ready to manage my data yet. As for the patent stuff, that’s going to be an issue always, with the world full of nutters who think software patents make sense. My approach is to ignore it until I’m forced to do otherwise. Thanks for the extra information.

  2. We’re far ahead of BTRFS and, barring a few kinks in the caching inside FUSE, you should be able to get performance comparable to in-kernel solutions right now. Oh, and ZFS users have tons of data protection success stories. ZFS FTW.

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