GSoC Introduction: ZFS Port

I'm Ankur Sethi, a 20 year old hacker from New Delhi, India. I mostly program in Python and Objective-C (on Mac OS X/iOS). This summer, I will work on porting ZFS to Haiku as part of Google Summer of Code 2011. My proposal lives here.

ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager built by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) for OpenSolaris. Besides having a 'Z' in the name -- which automatically grants it +100 awesome points -- ZFS sports a feature set that will enable developers to build some incredibly neat applications on top of Haiku. For example, ZFS supports files and volumes up to 16 exabytes in size. It is designed from the ground up with a focus on protecting data from silent corruption (bit rot, cosmic radiation, etc.) Thanks to its copy-on-write nature, creating snapshots on ZFS is quick, easy and cheap, which takes the pain out of creating backups. This Wikipedia article does a better job than I ever could of describing why ZFS is, as Oracle's marketing department will be happy to let you know, the last word in filesystems.

I will be spending the Community Bonding period studying how the FreeBSD port of ZFS and zfs-fuse work. I will also be reading some of the available literature on ZFS. Once the coding period starts, I will use this blog to keep everyone updated on what I'm doing.

Looking forward to a great summer :)