[Soc-coordination] Possible GSoC idea: ZFS on Linux integration

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sat, Mar 02, 2013 at 01:44:59AM +0800, Aron Xu wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> ZFS provides many more advanced features than any other filesystems
> available to Linux users, and it's proven in production environment
> for years. There is btrfs under heavy development to provide similar
> functions, while the way is still quite long to go, at the same time
> native ZFS on Linux (ZoL, [1]) is a low hanging food for users. To
> achieve this target we have two things to do: make zfs actually work
> on a Linux distribution; make it better integrated into the system,
> pushing its higher-level functions more handy to end users. I believe
> when btrfs is finally landed with most of planned features, it can
> benefit a lot from such work.
> 
> There is no Linux distribution currently provide ZFS support so far,
> and I would like to propose such a project to make Debian the first
> project to integrate it.

I'm extremely interested in this effort, and would love such a project

> 
> As for license concerns, ZoL is distributed in the form of two Linux
> kernel modules, spl and zfs. The first one is Solaris Porting Layer,
> licensed under GPL-2+, providing a set of system calls that is
> compatible to Solaris; and the other one is the actual stuff of ZFS,
> licensed under CDDL. In this way, both of the modules can be legally
> distributed using dkms or pre-built binary modules.

Are we sure about that? This seems like a tough call. I'm tempted to
call SPL irrelevant on this (I mean, I don't know how it works, but if
it's sharing memory with the CDDL, they're a combined work.

*can* we distribute it? We should ask the FTP* folks about this IMHO.

I know there was concern about it never being able to become part of the
Linux tree, and I do understand this is a different problem than that
(well, mostly).

> 
> 
> [1]http://zfsonlinux.org
> 
> 
> -- 
> Regards,
> Aron Xu
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Soc-coordination mailing list
> Soc-coordination at lists.alioth.debian.org
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/soc-coordination

Cheers,
  Paul

-- 
 .''`.  Paul Tagliamonte <paultag at debian.org>
: :'  : Proud Debian Developer
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 `-     http://people.debian.org/~paultag
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