A note about ZFS on FreeBSD

ZFS on FreeBSD is the thing that I really wait for since its major debut in OpenSolaris. FreeBSD is an interesting OS for me (personally) because its history and development way. FreeBSD is currently adding additional features “that really rock” for the next release (version 7).  The first thing before FreeBSD 7 released is that I need to read quarterly report from its mailing list about ZFS on FreeBSD.

This is the link to the quarterly report of FreeBSD 7

• Quarter 3 – 2007
• Quarter 2 – 2007
• Quarter 1 – 2007

The thing that I said before that really rock are ZFS and SMPng features. For right now I will discuss about ZFS.

ZFS was designed and implemented by a team at Sun led by Jeff Bonwick. It was announced on September 14, 2004. Source code for ZFS was integrated into the main trunk of Solaris development on October 31, 2005 and released as part of build 27 of OpenSolaris on November 16, 2005. Sun announced that ZFS was included in the 6/06 update to Solaris 10 in June 2006, one year after the opening of the OpenSolaris community.

The name originally stood for “Zettabyte File System”, but is now a pseudo-initialism. [taken from wikipedia.org]

This filesystem is completely designed with multi features including:

• Cloning feature
• Snapshot [other link]
• Self healing for data corruption
• Compression support
• Cache management
• Unlimited capacity (theoretically) since it is actually 128bit filesystem
• Open source :p

For further information you may see ZFM Man by Pawel Jacub Dawidek video of ZFS.

If you wanna use ZFS, you may try the beta version of FreeBSD 7. Please note that FreeBSD 7 is not released yet. It will be released soon. For testing ZFS you have to remember this sentence clearly:

Do at your own risk!

Important Links:

• FreeBSD 7 Beta 2 iso images data
• FreeBSD 7 Beta Download Now
• Dawidek’s video (AVI) during EuroBSDCon 2007
• Dawidek’s Presentation (PDF) suring EuroBSDCon 2007

 

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