The professional filesystem ZFS
Revolutionary
ZFS is a first-class filesystem for big iron, but for various reasons, it is still waiting for widespread Linux adoption.
With over 15 years of development, ZFS [1] is one of the oldest of the current Unix-like filesystems. The ZFS filesystem was originally developed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris operating system and was published for the first time in 2005. ZFS was originally intended as a closed-source, proprietary filesystem for high-end Solaris storage environments.
When Sun open-sourced Solaris in 2005 with the OpenSolaris project, ZFS went with it. Oracle acquired Sun in 2009 and, in 2010, Oracle declared it was returning ZFS to a closed-source development model. Thanks to the beauty of open source licensing, the ZFS community continued to develop and maintain the open source version of ZFS. The umbrella project for ZFS development is now known as OpenZFS.
The open version of ZFS is licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) [2]. The CDDL is recognized as a Free and Open Source license by the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, but the CDDL has limited copyleft protection and is thus considered incompatible with the Linux kernel's GPL. Because of this incompatibility, it isn't easy for developers to integrate ZFS directly with the Linux kernel. Although various workarounds are possible, the license incompatibility has slowed ZFS adoption in Linux. As you will learn in this article, ZFS is typically implemented as a separate add-on module or as a Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) [3] in Linux environments.
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