ZFS is a file system and logical volume manager developed by Sun Microsystems. It is designed for high-performance, fault-tolerant, large-scale Unix-like systems.
ZFS history
ZFS was first developed at Sun in 2001 as a proprietary file system, and was released as an open-source component of OpenSolaris in 2005. In 2010, when Sun was acquired by Oracle, ZFS reverted to closed-source, proprietary software.
- ZFS history.
- ZFS features.
- Operating systems that support ZFS.
In 2013, the development teams of the illumos, Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS operating systems collaborated to release a new open-source version of ZFS, OpenZFS.
ZFS features
ZFS features include:
- Maximum volume size of 256 trillion yottabytes.
- Maximum file size of 16 exbibytes.
- Unlimited number of files, maximum 248 per directory.
- POSIX attributes and permissions, and NFSv4 ACLs.
- Support for forked file contents (extended attributes).
- Transparent file system compression and encryption.
- Support for RAID levels 0, 1, 10, 5 (RAIDZ), 6 (RAIDZ2), and RAIDZ3.
- Copy-on-write and data deduplication.
Operating systems that support ZFS
The following operating systems completely or partially support ZFS:
- FreeBSD
- Illumos
- Linux
- macOS Server
- NetBSD
- OpenSolaris
- Solaris
Linux support
Due to licensing incompatibilities, ZFS support on Linux is largely restricted to user space, mounted as a FUSE filesystem. This restriction satisfies the ZFS license, at a performance cost. However, in 2016, Ubuntu 16.04 introduced a segregated development model that satisfies the ZFS license terms, and began including ZFS support as a kernel module.
Hierarchical file system, Operating System terms
