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Ubuntu Plans To Make ZFS File-System Support Standard On Linux
An anonymous reader writes: Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth revealed today that they're planning to make ZFS standard on Ubuntu. They are planning to include ZFS file-system as "standard in due course," but no details were revealed beyond that. However, ZFS On Linux contributor Richard Yao has said they do plan on including it in their kernel for 16.04 LTS and the GPL vs. CDDL license worries aren't actually a problem. Many Linux users have been wanting ZFS on Linux, but aside from the out of tree module there hasn't been any luck in including it in the mainline kernel or with tier-one Linux distributions due to license differences.
Nearly all of the original Sun devs that created ZFS in the first place, still work on OpenZFS full time and are paid to do so. OpenZFS is very actively developed. They have 2 or more presentations per year about all of the changes they're constantly making and some of the upcoming big changes. Currently they are focusing on standardizing ZFS between FreeBSD, Luminos, and Linux. It's a large refactoring effort to have all ZFS's code bases to live in the same tree. One OpenZFS code tree for all OSes. Everyone will be in sync.
While you can't shrink ZFS pools because they cannot do that atomically, and they refuse to do anything that allows the end user to shoot themselves in the foot, like leaving the FS in an inconsistent state, you can create a new pool that is smaller and import your larger pool into the smaller one, as long as it fits. Can't do it in-place, but you can do it. It just sucks to do that with a 1PiB+ pool. But who shrinks those?