Production-ready ZFS offers cosmic-scale storage for Linux • The Register

Production-ready ZFS offers cosmic-scale storage for Linux • The Register

Exciting, this:

The maintainers of the native Linux port of the ZFS high-reliability filesystem have announced that the most recent release, version 0.6.1, is officially ready for production use.

But, there's been this more than palliative...

So when will the latest, production-ready release of ZoL find its way into the kernel of your favorite Linux distro? Ah, there's the catch. Because of incompatible licensing and other intellectual property concerns, the ZFS filesystem module can't be distributed with the Linux kernel.

[Yet...]

For that reason, much of the Linux community has already turned toward Btrfs, a GPL-licensed filesystem that has been under development at Oracle since 2007 and which offers similar features to ZFS.
Still, those who are impressed by the possibilities of ZFS and would like to try it out on their Linux systems – or who are already using it and who want the most stable version – can download source tarballs and packages from the project's website.  

I recall when Apple was considering ZFS, and then screeched halt on that. But as _Ars_ pointed out in February, there's even a petition to get ZFS into OS X and make it modern.

See: <http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/02/zfs-loving-mac-users-demand-support-in-os-x-10-9/>

The petition argument:

Some Mac users are demanding that Apple add modern file system support in the next major version of OS X. Anonline petition has been started to let Apple know that its aging HFS+ file system just won't cut it any more, and the company should include ZFS in OS X 10.9, expected later this year.

HFS+ is the current file system used by OS X (and iOS). It was originally developed as HFS, or "Hierarchical File System," for the original Mac OS in the early '80s. A team at Apple, led by engineer Don Brady, adapted HFS for 32-bit systems in the mid-1990s. Brady later adapted HFS+ to work with the UNIX environment that OS X was built on, and over time he and other Apple engineers added additional features, including the extensible metadata used by Mac OS X's Spotlight search, live partition resizing used for Boot Camp, and the Adaptive Hot File Clustering used to reduce seek times for oft-used system files.

Despite all the features Apple has managed to tack on to HFS+, though, its design certainly isn't modern. "The initial HFS+ was primarily about addressing the block count problem," Brady told Ars in 2011. "Since we believed it was only a stop-gap solution, we just went from 16 to 32 bits. Had we known that it would still be in use 15 years later with multi-terabyte drives, we probably would have done more design changes!"
ZFS, on the other hand, was designed from the ground up to address the ever-increasing needs for large amounts of storage, as well as the need to protect data as it is written to and read from disk.