Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Is Continuing To Prep ZFS Support

Back in October we heard Ubuntu was planning for better ZFS support and to make it part of the distribution's "standard offering." Work in that direction has continued to advance for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Chad Miller of Canonical shared that "ZFS is right now 90% ready on (what will be) Ubuntu 16.04." There still are new ZFS packages to land in the Ubuntu 16.04, but Chad has the current packages queued up in a PPA. These packages will allow for installing Ubuntu to a ZFS partition, but an EFI partition is still needed. Additionally, there's no support in Ubuntu's Ubiquity graphical installer for setting up an easy ZFS-based system.

More details via this Google+ post. Sans the official distribution support, you can already use the ZFS file-system on the distribution of your choice using the wonderful ZFSOnLinux.org.

EXT4 will obviously be the default file-system still for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. There's also still nothing out on the horizon indicating Oracle might be prone to re-licensing the ZFS to something GPL-compatible rather than the CDDL so that it would be accepted in the mainline kernel.