ZFS is ready for your Linux desktop

As first thing a small lesson about what’s ZFS:

ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include protection against data corruption, support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. ZFS is implemented as open-source software, licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). The ZFS name was registered as a trademark of Oracle until September 20, 2011

 

And now after more than two years in the experimental stage, the ZFS file system for Linux is ready for widespread use.



Or at least those are the words of developer Brian Behlendorf, who announced version numbered 0.6.1. Brian says that ZFS for Linux is ready for use on a broad base of devices, from desktops to supercomputers.

Native ZFS for Linux is based on Solaris Porting Layer (SPL), which in turn emulates the basic features of Solaris to Linux kernel. Unlike the implementation via FUSE ( Filesystem in userspace ) of ZFS, this native port provides much better performance due to the implementation of the file system as a module in the kernel.

ZFS 0.6.1 for Linux delivers numerous bug fixes, a new page with instructions and support for Linux kernel 3.9, which is still in development.

Source code can be  downloaded from github and compiled  for your own system or you can use the repositories of your distribution (Debian, Fedora, RHEL / CentOS, Ubuntu, Arch, etc.).

In fact to simplify the installation and management of ZFS the ZFS team has prepared repositories for Debian, Fedora, and RHEL/CentOS.

They can be found at the following URLs.

Debian: Add to /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://archive.zfsonlinux.org/debian wheezy main
deb-src deb http://archive.zfsonlinux.org/debian wheezy main

Fedora: See http://zfsonlinux.org/fedora for directions.
rpm http://archive.zfsonlinux.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch
srpm http://archive.zfsonlinux.org/fedora/$releasever/SRPMS

RHEL/CentOS: See http://zfsonlinux.org/epel for directions.
rpm http://archive.zfsonlinux.org/epel/$releasever/$basearch
spms http://archive.zfsonlinux.org/epel/$releasever/SRPMS

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