ZFS/ZoL on Yocto

ZFS/ZoL on Yocto

[Manuel Wagesreither]

Hello all,

I would like to know if anyone has experiences with equipping Yocto created images with ZFS support.

If I'm not mistaken, the main problems of using ZFS in linux are of legal nature. ZFS can not go into the linux kernel source tree, as it conflicts with the GPL. Hence, the linux version of ZFS called ZoL (ZFS-On-Linux) must be compiled as kernel module and recompiled at every kernel bump. On normal machines, that's a bit cumbersome, but for Yocto this shouldn't be a problem at all.

So, given the large fanbase ZFS has, I'm wondering why there are no recipes around?

I googled a bit, and these are the only meaningful results I found:
* https://lists.yoctoproject.org/g/yocto/message/29331
* https://gist.github.com/cveilleux/54961ccc41071e8aee8c19b69fcba78f

Regards,
Manuel

Re: [yocto] ZFS/ZoL on Yocto

[Alexandre Belloni]

On 17/08/2021 17:52:17+0200, Manuel Wagesreither wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I would like to know if anyone has experiences with equipping Yocto created images with ZFS support.
> 
> If I'm not mistaken, the main problems of using ZFS in linux are of legal nature. ZFS can not go into the linux kernel source tree, as it conflicts with the GPL. Hence, the linux version of ZFS called ZoL (ZFS-On-Linux) must be compiled as kernel module and recompiled at every kernel bump. On normal machines, that's a bit cumbersome, but for Yocto this shouldn't be a problem at all.
> 
> So, given the large fanbase ZFS has, I'm wondering why there are no recipes around?
> 

I'm guessing that ZFS is not really popular on embedded systems ;)

> I googled a bit, and these are the only meaningful results I found:
> * https://lists.yoctoproject.org/g/yocto/message/29331
> * https://gist.github.com/cveilleux/54961ccc41071e8aee8c19b69fcba78f
> 
> Regards,
> Manuel

> 
> 
> 


-- 
Alexandre Belloni, co-owner and COO, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com