Hi,
I spent some time digging into btrfs and zfs internals. Give a choice,
I'd probably prefer to run btrfs on a desktop system[1], but having it
as the default filesystem on Haiku is pretty much a no-go because of
the GPL.
So I've been wondering: what are the core developers' thoughts on
having zfs as the default filesystem in Haiku[2]?
Zfs would give us almost everything we need: snapshots and clones,
per-block checksums, extended attributes, encryption, great
performance and size limits we probably won't hit anytime soon.
Indexing can then be handled by the index_server in userland.
My concern is: would it be preferable to have a home-grown FS instead
of porting an existing one?
The porting effort would involve porting zfs to Haiku, getting Haiku
to boot off a zfs partition, adding support for initializing zfs
partitions to DriveSetup and a graphical administration tool. I have
not spent enough time with the zfs codebase to be able to say how much
is doable in one summer; right now I'm just looking for feedback on
the idea.
[1] I find btrfs simpler.
[2] In R2, of course.
