On Wed, 4 Sep 2013, Craig Sanders wrote:
Zfs is excellent - now if only Oracle would release it under a GPL2-compatible license...
can't see that happening.
it is, however, open source - just not GPL so can't be distributed with the kernel. fortunately, there's no impediment to compiling and installing the module yourself, or even having a dkms package to automate the process.
some distros (gentoo and arch iirc) even distribute binary modules - i'm not convinced that that is entirely safe for them to do, but it's their necks on the line, not mine.
From the mailing list, the 0.6.2 .deb packages haven't been built this time around because supposedly it is now in debian official upstream (experimental), although several people report it's not quite there yet. Obviously built by the same legal and Linus-condoned dkms methods. Given that I'm about to spend 6 weeks overseas, I'm not about to try installing it though :)
(My fileserver has for the first time ever managed to stay up for 31 days without my raspberry pi watchdog rebooting it. I don't really know what changed other than moving / from a very slow SD card to a faster real SSD. I also changed backuppc to fill in incrementals, so maybe there's a lot less metadata (we already know zfs fails on metadata heavy workloads - current discussion is how some 320 byte objects are actually taking up 1024 bytes, but only counting as 320 bytes in the ARC accounting) being accessed in the daily incrementals - not having to seek back through 15 or so incrementals to work out what's changed in a given directory. At the expense of a huge number of hardlinks and inodes being consumed instead, and slower backups) -- Tim Connors