[Lustre-discuss] Lustre and ZFS

[Andreas Dilger]

On Apr 17, 2009  08:15 -0400, Mag Gam wrote:
> By looking at some slides on the wiki I noticed there is a lot of
> activity for using zfs as the underlying file system for Lustre on
> Linux which is great. But, I was under the impression ZFS or its ideas
> would never be ported to Linux because of license compatibility issues
> (CDDL and GPL).  My question is, in the future is Lustre going to
> offer binary copies (or just zfs-ldisk) of its filesystem?

The ZFS code is available and completely open source, so you shouldn't
confuse the CDDL vs. GPL licensing issues with binary, proprietary,
or closed source software.

While the final release license for the ZFS is not resolved, it is
definitely being implemented for Linux in the kernel.  For Lustre
we are only primarily concerned with a subset of the ZFS functionality,
called the Data Management Unit (DMU) and will not be implementing
the full ZFS filesystem for Linux at this time.

> Sorry if this is a silly question

This is actually the main question that people ask about ZFS.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.