More exciting news on the ZFS OpenSolaris front. In addition to the existing ZFS on FUSE/Linux work, we now have a second active port of ZFS, this time for FreeBSD. Pawel Dawidek has been hard at work, and has made astounding progress after just 10 days (!). This is both a testament to his ability as well as the portability of ZFS. As with any port, the hard part comes down to integrating the VFS layer, but Pawel has already made good progress there. The current prototype can already mount fielsystems, create files, and list directory contents. Of course, our code isn’t completely without portability headaches, but thanks to Pawel (and Ricardo on FUSE/Linux), we can take patches and implement the changes upstream to ease future maintenance. You can find the FreeBSD repository Here. If you’re a FreeBSD developer or user, please give Pawel whatever support you can, whether it’s code contributions, testing, or just plain old compliments. We’ll be helping out where we can on the OpenSolaris side.
In related news, Ricard Correia has made significant progress on the FUSE/Linux port. All the management functionality of zfs(1M) and zpool(1M) is there, and he’s working on mounting ZFS filesystems. All in all, it’s an exciting time, and we’re all crossing our fingers that ZFS will follow in the footsteps of its older brother DTrace.