RedHat is apparently building something new called Stratis based on XFS, they're shooting for delivery within the next 1-2 years. Supposedly it'll be feature-equivalent to ZFS/Btrfs/LVM.
The ZFS comment in the document [1] is time inspecific. It's got version 1.0 in 1st half of 2018 and the "rough ZFS feature parity" comment is not until version 3.0, which has no listed time frame.
This is going to take lot of work, and not just for the stratis developers but for projects that need to manipulate it. It's asking for a lot of work for bootloader projects to support it, and
I'm friends with some of the original ZFS guys, Jeff Bonwick was a student of mine at Stanford and I got him to come to Sun, Bill Moore worked for me on BitKeeper. Those guys are seriously studly engineers. I've done file system work at Sun, I don't compare with Bill & Jeff, they are way better.
So yeah, trying to do better than those guys is going to be interesting. I'd like to know who is on the RedHat team working on this new file system, just the fact that they are trying is interesting.
Edit: and I was at SGI when XFS was pretty new, I know some of the XFS folks as well, Adam Sweeney and Mike Nishimoto.
I was the guy that plugged XFS into NFS over HIPPI, so I have more than a passing knowledge of it:
XFS was pretty cool but a lot of the technology that made it fast was XLV, the logical volume manager. XFS just made sure it handed very large, aligned, I/O requests to the volume manager, the volume manager was the layer that split them up and got all the DMA engines going. That's how we did 500MB/sec in the early 1990's on 200mhz MIPS chips, the MIPS chips weren't touching the data, the DMA engines were (the networking stack did page flipping to avoid bcopies).
I know XFS did other stuff for scaling but it most certainly did not do all the safety stuff (and I don't think it did transparent compression, those 200mhz MIPS cpus weren't fast enough to put that in there) that ZFS does.
So I'm wondering how much XFS has evolved from the SGI days. If it hasn't, I don't get why RedHat started there. Be really interested to know the back story.
XFS is the de facto standard file system for RHEL deployments, they employ a lot of engineers familiar with the code and it's the default since RHEL7 came out.
Eric Sandeen works for Red Hat on XFS, at the least. Mike and Adam are elsewhere according to their LinkedIn profiles - dunno who else was working on it at SGI.
Filesystems are HARD, see the plethora of FS's on Linux that are dead, dying, or horribly engineered. This seems like such a monumental waste of resources, time, and energy to chase ZFS, which itself is not a stationary target. ZFS is constantly developing new features. I think a lack of ZFS in Linux is hurting it. And that wound will only deepen over time.
Well obviously Linux devs would love having ZFS in the kernel, Linus even half joked that he'd consider trying to relicense Linux to GPLv3 if it meant he could use ZFS and DTrace (this was back when Sun was considering GPLv3 as the license to use when going open source).
But the problem remains, CDDL and GPL are likely incompatible, and Linus has said that no CDDL licensed code will be merged, most likely per advice from lawyers.
So unless something drastically changes, ZFS is off the table, and thus work will continue on with alternatives, Stratis is one such alternative, bcachefs is another, and of course btrfs will not die just because Red Hat isn't supporting it anymore, as they barely did to begin with.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Stratis-R...