Free Software Linux

"I have had to apply the reiser4 patches from -mm kernels to vanilla based patchset for over a year now. Reiser4 works fine, what will it take to get it included in vanilla?" began a brief thread on the Linux Kernel mailing list.

"Since everybody seems to be having fun building new filesystems these days, I thought I should join the party, began Daniel Phillips, announcing the Tux3 versioning filesystem. He continued, "Tux3 is a write anywhere, atomic commit, btree based versioning filesystem. As part of this work, the venerable HTree design used in Ext3 and Lustre is getting a rev to better support NFS and possibly become more efficient." Daniel explained: "The main purpose of Tux3 is to embody my new ideas on storage data versioning. The secondary goal is to provide a more efficient snapshotting and replication method for the Zumastor NAS project, and a tertiary goal is to be better than ZFS."

A recent thread on the lkml discussed a blog entry stating that minimal ZFS support for GRUB was available under the GPL license, "we could now use that code to implement support for ZFS in the Linux kernel." Alan Cox explained, "no we can't. The GPL ZFS bits don't include the various methods that would violate the patent so there is no grant. I've several times asked Sun to simply give permission and they don't even answer. I can only read the Sun motivation one way - they want to look open but know that ZFS is about the only thing that might save Solaris as a product in the data centre so are not truly prepared to let Linus use it." H. Peter Anvin added, "from what I can see, it is an absolutely-minimal read only implementation."

You may have read in News Picks recently that Sun won a partial stay in the NetApp patent lawsuit over ZFS, according to IP Law 360:A judge has partly stayed software company Network Appliance Inc.'s patent lawsuit against rival Sun Microsystems Inc. over Sun's ZFS technology, pending the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's re-examination of one of the patents in the suit.