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Oracle Engineer Talks of ZFS File System Possibly Still Being Upstreamed On Linux (phoronix.com)
New submitter fstack writes: Senior software architect Mark Maybee who has been working at Oracle/Sun since '98 says maybe we "could" still see ZFS be a first-class upstream Linux file-system. He spoke at the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit about how Oracle's focus has shifted to the cloud and how they have reduced investment in Solaris. He admits that Linux rules the cloud. Among the Oracle engineer's hopes is that ZFS needs to become a "first class citizen in Linux," and to do so Oracle should port their ZFS code to Oracle Linux and then upstream the file-system to the Linux kernel, which would involve relicensing the ZFS code.
Just as this article popped up I was assembling a JBOD array (twelve 4TB drives) for a new data center project, my first in quite a while. Also self funded so I don't have to defer to anyone in decisions.
When I started I did a bit of reading trying to decide what RAID hardware to get. To make a long story short once I read the architecture of ZFS and several somewhat-polemic-but-well-reasoned blog entries I decided that is what I wanted.
Only two months ago I had an aged Dell RAID array let me down. I have no idea what actually happened, but it appears some error crept in one of the drives and it got faithfully spread across the array and there was just no recovering it. If I didn't have good backups that would have been about 12 years of the company's IP up in smoke. I just thought I'd share.
So I ended up as a prime candidate (with new found distrust for hardware RAID) to be a new ZFS-as-my-main-storage user. I've just recently learned stuff that was well established five years ago and I can't understand why doesn't everybody do it this way.
Wow. snapshots? I can do routine low-cost snapshots? Data compression? Sane volume management? (I consider LVM to the the crazy aunt in the attic. Part of the family but ...) Old Solaris hands are probably rolling their eyes but this is like mana from heaven to me.
Given the plethora of benefits I am sure the incentive is high enough to keep ZFS on Linux going onward. ZFS root file system would be nice but I am more than willing to work around that now.