Eric Schrock's Blog

ztest on Linux

June 12, 2006

As Jeff mentioned previously, Ricardo Correia has been working on porting ZFS to FUSE/Linux as part of Google SoC. Last week, Ricardo got libzpool and ztest running on Linux, which is a major first step of the project.

The interesting part is the set of changes that he had to make in order to get it working. libzpool was designed to be run from userland and the kernel from the start, so we’ve already done most of the work of separating out the OS-dependent interfaces. The most prolific changes were to satisfy GCC warnings. We do compile ON with gcc, but not using the default options. I’ve since updated the ZFS porting page with info about gcc use in ON, which should make future ports easier. The second most common change was header files that are available in both userland and kernel on Solaris, but nevertheless should be placed in zfs_context.h, concentrating platform-specific knowledge in this one file. Finally, there were some simple changes we could make (such as using pthread_create() instead of thr_create()) to make ports of the tools easier. It would also be helpful to have ports of libnvpair and libavl, much like some have done for libumem, so that developers don’t have to continually port the same libraries over and over.

The next step (getting zfs(1M) and zpool(1M) working) is going to require significantly more changes to our source code. Unlike libzpool, these tools (libzfs in particular) were not designed to be portable. They include a number of Solaris specific interfaces (such as zones and NFS shares) that will be totally different on other platforms. I look forward to seeing Ricardo’s progress to know how this will work out.

One Response

  1. Just wanted to say that the libnvpair and libavl ports were very trivial, I don’t think it’s necessary to have official ports for those.
    However, libumem is much more sophisticated. I haven’t integrated it in the ZFS linux port yet so, for now, I implemented it with mallocs and frees (just to get things running).

Recent Posts

April 21, 2013
February 28, 2013
August 14, 2012
July 28, 2012

Archives