[U-Boot] [PATCH] ZFS

Jorgen Lundman lundman at lundman.net
Wed May 23 06:00:37 CEST 2012



Wolfgang Denk wrote:
>>
>> As previously discussed, all sources are GPLv2.
>
> How would this be possible?  My understanding is that ZFS comes
> only under a GPL incompatible license.  Please elucidate.

Perhaps a more visual answer is in order, to my other two replies, on the 
license situation.

If you look in Solaris sources, for ZFS, you will find 94 files, of which 
94 files are of CDDL license. That is some:

(/usr/src/solaris11/usr/src)  wc -l ./uts/common/fs/zfs/*.[ch] 
./common/zfs/*.[ch] ./uts/common/sys/fs/z*
   103993 total

So, about 100k worth of source. But Sun had no way to boot intel platform. 
So they wrote a subset "ZFS boot" sources for GRUB, under GPL v2 license.



Ie, 22 files, all GPLv2.

(/usr/src/grub-0.97/) wc -l include/zfs/* fs/zfs/*.[ch]
   4328 total

At no point is the GRUB/u-boot ZFS sources the same as the actual 
file-system files. (Although, some of the headers overlap). As Sun wanted 
GRUB support, they were forced to release GRUB ZFS subset sources as GPLv2.

Lund

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