LLNL Talks To Us About Their Linux ZFS Port

Following this morning's article entitled Native ZFS Is Coming To Linux Next Month where the work by a small company from India that ported ZFS to Linux as a native kernel module was discussed, we heard from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. As was mentioned in today's ZFS article, the LLNL received a contract from the United States Department of Energy to port Sun's ZFS file-system to Linux.

Brian Behlendorf, the lead developer of this Linux ZFS port at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, shared the following information with us about their work and that of KQ Infotech on their ZFS module to be released in mid-September.

- KQ Infotech's ZFS port is indeed based off of LLNL's work. It's based off of the SPL/ZFS 0.4.9 tar-balls that the national laboratories had published to their GitHub page.

- Brian Behlendorf intends to pull changes made by KQ Infotech into their ZFS code-base.

- Eventually their ZFS port will be updated against onnv_147, which is the last OpenSolaris build to be made public prior to Oracle killing OpenSolaris. It though will take some time before they are compatible with the build 147 release in order to maintain "the current level of stability and Linux kernel portability."

- On our forums there is KQ Infotech already referring to this as "by far the best file system" and "Thats why its long awaited, am not just bullshitting here, a lot of storage companies are keenly looking forward to this solution and only if you are related to the storage industry, will you know the real gem ZFS is! Nothing to laugh on ZFS being the best file system, hell it is!!!" However, the actual state of this ZFS Linux port may not be so pleasant. Behlendorf urges caution that ZFS for Linux is still a work in progress and there remains lots of work to be done.