[talk] ZFS FreeBSD future confusion?

Isaac (.ike) Levy ike at blackskyresearch.net
Wed Jun 12 17:27:35 EDT 2019


On Wed, Jun 12, 2019, at 4:46 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 12:35 PM Isaac (.ike) Levy 
> <ike at blackskyresearch.net> wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 12, 2019, at 2:20 PM, Isaac (.ike) Levy wrote:
> > 
> >  > Aside from trying to keep up with 40-char tweets, has *anyone* in the 
> >  > FreeBSD universe written up a clear public statement about the state of 
> >  > things- and the future plans?
> >  > (Like a plain language, coherent, paragraph or two.)
> > 
> >  Oh- I sortof found the answers I wanted on page 17 in Alan Jude's slide deck:
> > 
> >  "Fighting the FUD
> >  ●This news resulted in some immediate negative gut reactions
> >  ●There is only one OpenZFS, we are all in this together
> >  ●FreeBSD will get features sooner, be more involved upstream
> >  ●Linux uses the SPL (Solaris Porting Layer) to run ZFS code as close to the illumos upstream as possible
> >  ●FreeBSD does similar, so using ZoL code will not inject Linux or GPL code into the FreeBSD kernel
> >  ●No Linux-KPI shims are used for ZFS code"
> > 
> >  Sounds rational. I'm still feeling shaky, ZFS on FreeBSD is just *so darned good* right now.
> 
> Basically, ZoL and FreeBSD had Illumos as our upstream. ZoL has added a 
> bunch in a way that could be upstreamed, but weren't due to the extreme 
> slow pace of Illumos taking changes, as well as viability issues with 
> Illumos. FreeBSD is rebasing from Illumos to ZoL because the official 
> upstream of OpenZFS is moving from Illumos to ZoL because the efforts 
> of adding the missing bits since the fork to ZoL was much smaller than 
> vice versa. ZoL is an unfortunate name because it has the trigger word 
> Linux in it. The ZoL folks are not the LKM folks, but quite reasonable 
> people without the GPL politics getting in the way that caused Linux to 
> be such a trigger word.
> 
> Warner

Thanks Warner, very much appreciate this statement- a relief to see an excellent and clearly rational future for ZFS on FreeBSD!

Looks like my paranoia was all due to:

- Anything changing my filesystem makes me edgy
- Linux/politics fud, looks like I got bit!

Best,
.ike



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