[talk] ZFS FreeBSD future confusion?

[Isaac (.ike) Levy]

Hi All,

Folks who know me, know me as a ZFS user/lover since Pawel first brought it in to FreeBSD.

In a previous message to talk@, I raised that there confusion about changes in ZFS "upstream".

Warner Losh noted this is "maybe not well publicized".  After digging around online, it sure is not well publicized- and I want to know details.  Even digging through lists, (these days- *which lists* of many?)

ZFS:

- What excactly are these changes?
- Why and how was this decided?
- When is ZFS upstream supposed to be changing?
- What are the technical pros/cons of this change?
- What are the license implications (Linux !!!!), and what will they be in the future (GPL3)?

- Am I simply having a dream, nightmare perhaps?

--
I'm terribly dismayed but not panicing, FreeBSD 12.x-REL is stable and fabulous, I guess if my filesystem is going to be pulled out from under me 12.x FreeBSD could become the new 4.11-REL (which I and many others ran in some contexts for a decade past EOL for *reasons*).

Anybody have any concrete info on these ZFS changes?

Best,
.ike





On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 I wrote

> The ZFS codebase changes (Linux vs OpenZFS etc…)
...
> Just saying, future of ZFS on FreeBSD, this really needs some more public
> understanding- and discussion on it’s own.
>

Warner Losh imp at bsdimp.com wrote:
Sat Apr 27 13:20:27 EDT 2019 

OpenZFS is moving towards rebasing its upstream from Illumos to ZoL and ZoL
is expanding its coverage to include non-Linux OSes and has made explicit
commitments to the OpenZFS leadership about keeping the source of truth
useful for non-linux users. This has been public, but maybe not well
publicized. FreeBSD is looking to rebase things to this new upstream.