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One of the hallmarks from BSD is the ZFS file system. It stands for Zettabyte File System. It was developed for use in openSolaris under the Sun Microsystem banner. The main authors are Matthew Aherns and Jeff Bonwick. Oracle purchased Sun, consequently openSolaris became close sourced. In retaliation, the ZFS developers left, and created the OpenZFS Foundation.
The foundation’s sole purpose was to further develop ZFS for different operating systems. It was quickly adopted by the BSD world. However, it is slow in Linux distros for file system adoption. The original license is prohibitive and is not compatible with most Linux licenses. As I understand it, the original license requires all old ZFS contributors to sign on to the license change. Unfortunately a few of the ZFS coders are missing or deceased. Therefore it is difficult to have a successful license switch to a Linux compliant license for the kernel.
Yet developers will supply the means to install OpenZFS into the distro. According to the OpenZFS sources, these operating systems can utilize it.
Since Ubuntu 19.10, ZFS is installed as root as an option during installation. Further details can be found here regarding ZFS and Ubuntu. I recently installed Ubuntu MATE choosing the ZFS option.
I had no issues using the ZFS-fused Ubuntu MATE on my laptop. I use this laptop with the experimental code with zero issues. However, I am not a power user, so my use case is fairly weak. I am currently using it for writing, web surfing, and the occasional Zoom conference. Yet why consider using ZFS on Linux?
As taken from the FreeBSD manual, these are the three aims of ZFS: data integrity, pooled storage, and performance. Data integrity focuses on the ability of checking the data against a checksum; ZFS takes snapshots of the system. If there is no match against the checksum, ZFS will attempt to correct the errors. Pooled storage is the ability to increase memory when devices are added into the system for all the file systems. In a large data storage system, these features would be desired. I have no experience in data management file systems. The performance is desirable, but a central caveat is that ZFS can be expensive to maintain and implement. The system requires extra drives. Therefore it is a bit more expensive.
Next month I will take a look at the Software in the Public Interest non-profit corporation. It is a non-profit organization based in New York that focuses on open source hardware and software.