Ubuntu 19.10 with ZFS support for root as an experimental option in its installer

Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine

Ya we've been on the topic of the ZFS file system on Linux for a long time. In fact, Richard Stallman himself said that "Including ZFS on Linux was impossible»Due to incompatible licensing issues between GPL and CDDL. But Canonical has also been working for a long time to do so due to the benefits that this FS has for its Ubuntu distro. In fact, they have now implemented support for ZFS on the root partition as an experimental option in their Ubuntu 19.10 installer.

Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" will bring important improvementsIt will be one of the biggest updates to the popular Linux distro, and Canonical has some surprises for this one, as well as new features ahead of the arrival of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Among them is that I comment on ZFS with which you can format your root partition if you want. That way, you will have all the power and advantages it offers.

For those who do not know ZFS, is a file system whose initials come from Zettabyte File System. It was originally created by the Sun Microsystems company (now Oracle) for their wonderful Solaris operating system. Since 2004, the project led by Jeff Bonwick, has been growing and advancing. It stands out for its capacity, form of administration, self-healing, Copy-on-write transaction model, support for snapshots, variable-size bands (Dynamic striping), variable-size blocks, transparent encryption, etc. .

As for the issue of licenses, from Canonical they have done it because zfs.ko, the kernel module With the driver for this FS, it is independent of the Linux kernel, and therefore you can use another non-GPL license. That is so, in fact, the creation of Linux modules was made precisely for that, to allow modules with other licenses and even closed source to be integrated without conflicts with the GPL. Personally I think that having ZFS on Linux is not negative, quite the opposite ...

By the way, there are also a fork of the original ZFS known as openZFS...


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  1.   Harry said

    Is ZFS GPL Compliant?