Making the ZFS file system (Interview)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

This week Matt Ahrens joins Adam to talk about ZFS. Matt co-founded the ZFS project at Sun Microsystems in 2001. And 20 years later Adam picked up ZFS for use in his home lab and loved it. So, he reached out to Matt and invited him on the show. They cover the origins of the file system, its journey from proprietary to open source, architecture choices like copy-on-write, the ins and outs of creating and managing ZFS, RAID-Z and RAID-Z expansion, and Matt even shares plans for ZFS in the cloud with ZFS object store.

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Featuring:

• Matthew Ahrens – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website

Show Notes:

• Matt Ahrens on openzfs.org
• State of OpenZFS 2021 by Matt Ahrens
• ZFS RAIDZ stripe width, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love RAIDZ
• ZFS fans, rejoice—RAIDz expansion will be a thing very soon
• Common Development and Distribution License 1.0
• Linus Torvalds: Avoid Oracle’s ZFS kernel code on Linux until ‘litigious’ Larry signs off

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!