ZFS File-System On Linux Moves Along

A new release of the native ZFS file-system module implementation for the Linux kernel (not the FUSE-based ZFS) has been released by the team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The features for the spl/zfs-0.6.0-rc10 release include:

- Added zpool persistent comment field
- Added zfs "clones" property
- Added zfs "written" and "written@..." properties
- "zfs send" can estimate stream size
- "zfs destroy" can determine how much space will be reclaimed when destroying multiple datasets
- Added "zpool reguid" command
- Fixed "zpool online -e" device expansion
- ZVOL discard improvements
- Linux 3.5 compatibility
- Initial support to automate the processes of patching your kernel to include built in support for ZFS.

Release candidates of version 0.6 for ZFS and the Solaris Porting Layer (SPL) have been coming out for the past eighteen months now. The most recent ZFS On Linux benchmarks were completed back in June. LLNL's implementation is much faster than the FUSE-based ZFS.

The latest open-source code for this native ZFS Linux implementation can be found at ZFSOnLinux.org. The release announcement for this RC10 release can be found on zfs-announce.

Sadly this file-system implementation still stands no chance of being accepted within the mainline Linux kernel since Oracle continues to license ZFS under the GPL-incompatible CDDL.