NetBSD-SoC: ZFS

I am Oliver Gould, a System Administrator and student at Stevens Institute of Techmology in Hoboken, NJ. Google is giving me a Summer of Code grant to port ZFS to NetBSD during the summer of 2007.

Dieter Baron will be mentoring me through this project with Jason Thorpe, Matthias Scheler, Brett Lymn, and, of course, the NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenSolaris communities.

Sun Microsystem's Zettabyte Filesystem (ZFS), since Nov 2005, has proven to be a major breakthrough in filesystem technology, supporting features such as disk pools, snapshots, 'unlimited' scalability, and various other performance improvements over prior art. Such advancements will make ZFS a major force in industry in coming years.

A BSD-licensed implementation of ZFS is utterly impractical within the constraints of Google's Summer of Code (SoC). However, porting the CDDL'd ZFS implementation present in OpenSolaris is feasible. In particular, Pawel Jakub Dawidek has been able to port a significant portion of ZFS to FreeBSD. His work provides a good basis for porting ZFS to NetBSD.

Furthermore, OpenSolaris has published a high-level roadmap for porting ZFS to other platforms. This outlines a path for success, which I shall follow.

Current Status: Preparation

See my blog for more information.

• 2007/05/28: Project start
• 2007/06/03: Initial development plan
• 2007/06/17: Storage Pool Allocator (VDEV, ARC, & ZIO) complete
• 2007/06/24: Data Management Unit complete
• 2007/07/01: libzpool, ztest, and zdb complete
  
• 2007/07/08: Phase 2 development plan outlining userland management tools including:
  • zfs(1)
  • zpool(1)
  • /dev/zfs
• 2007/07/09: [Project midterm]
• 2007/07/22: Phase 2 implementation complete
• 2007/07/29: Phase 3 of development plan outlining ZVOL
• 2007/08/18: 'Final' development plan blueprinting zpl
• 2007/08/20: Project summary and lessons learned

The primary objectives of this project are:

• A functional zpool implementation
• Documentation and plan for future development

Secondary objectives include:

• /dev/zfs
• libzfs
• ZVOL

• My blog on ZFS for NetBSD
• ZFS committed to the FreeBSD base
• ZFS @ OpenSolaris.org