[U-Boot] [PATCH] ZFS

Jorgen Lundman lundman at lundman.net
Tue May 22 05:51:30 CEST 2012


>
> Does that imply the possibility that a ZFS driver might one day get
> added to the Linux kernel proper?
>

ZOL http://zfsonlinux.org/ already exists and runs very well. But it should 
be noted that the license prohibits the *distribution* of Linux with ZFS. 
Which is why it is a separate kernel module. Read more about license on the 
ZOL pages from people who know more about it than I.

So *I* don't think we will see a kernel with ZFS already in it, but you can 
already "apt-get install zfs" for many distributions. I use initrd to load 
ZFS then boot my pool.

However, that is a separate issue here, since ZOL is based on the Solaris 
kernel sources, which are CDDL.

GRUB ZFS "booting" sources are based on the GRUB GPL sources, provided by 
Sun to GRUB.

They are very stripped down, and can only read files, on single/mirror. No 
RAIDZ etc logic was released as GPL, so GRUB sources can not boot from 
those volumes (a limitation from day one).

I did notice that Illumos (OpenIndiana) have work started on extending GRUB 
boot, and ZFS crypto. But that is currently futureware.

Lund

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