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Also known as Zettabyte File System

ZFS (previously Zettabyte File System) is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris, including ZFS, were published under an open source license as OpenSolaris for around 5 years from 2005 before being placed under a closed source license when Oracle Corporation acquired Sun in 20092010. During 2005 to 2010, the open source version of ZFS was ported to Linux, Mac OS X (continued as MacZFS) and FreeBSD. In 2010, the illumos project forked a then-recent version of OpenSolaris, including ZFS,

Key facts

Filesystem.name
ZFS
Filesystem.variants
Oracle ZFS, OpenZFS
Filesystem.developer
Sun Microsystems originally, Oracle Corporation since 2010, OpenZFS since 2013
Filesystem.introduction_os
OpenSolaris
Filesystem.directory_struct
Extendible hashing
Filesystem.max_filename_size
1023 ASCII characters (fewer for multibyte character standards such as Unicode)
Filesystem.max_volume_size
256 trillion yobibytes (2128 bytes)
Filesystem.max_capacity
256 UB (2128 bytes)
Filesystem.max_file_size
16 exbibytes (264 bytes)
Filesystem.forks_streams
Yes (called "extended attributes", but they are full-fledged streams)
Filesystem.attributes
POSIX, extended attributes
Filesystem.file_system_permissions
Unix permissions, NFSv4 ACLs
Filesystem.compression
Yes
Filesystem.data_deduplication
Yes
Filesystem.encryption
Yes
Filesystem.copy_on_write
Yes
Filesystem.OS
Sun codebase: OpenSolaris, illumos distributions, OpenIndiana Oracle ZFS: Solaris OpenZFS: FreeBSD, Mac OS X Server 10.5 (limited to read-only), NetBSD, Linux via third-party kernel module ("ZFS on Linux") or ZFS-FUSE, OSv

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Official website
www.open-zfs.org
Show 6 more facts
Stack Exchange tag
stackoverflow.com/tags/zfs
short name
ZFS
start time
2005-11-00
software version identifier
0.7.13 (zfs) 0.7.13 (spl)
maximum size or capacity
16
upper limit
256000000000000
Sources (4)

via Wikidata · CC0

~58 min read

Article

39 sections
Contents
  • Overview
  • History
  • 2004–2010: Development at Sun Microsystems
  • Since 2010: Development at Oracle, OpenZFS
  • Features
  • Summary
  • Data integrity
  • RAID <span class="anchor" id="RAID-Z"></span> <span class="anchor" id="RAIDZ"></span>
  • Avoidance of hardware RAID controllers
  • ZFS's approach: RAID-Z and mirroring
  • Resilvering and scrub (array syncing and integrity checking)
  • Capacity
  • Encryption
  • Read/write efficiency
  • Other features
  • Storage devices, spares, and quotas
  • Caching mechanisms: ARC, L2ARC, Transaction groups, ZIL, SLOG, Special VDEV <span class="anchor" id="Caching mechanisms"></span>
  • Special VDEV Class
  • Copy-on-write transactional model
  • Snapshots and clones
  • Sending and receiving snapshots
  • Dynamic striping
  • Variable block sizes
  • Lightweight filesystem creation
  • Adaptive endianness
  • Deduplication
  • Additional capabilities
  • Limitations
  • Data recovery
  • OpenZFS and ZFS
  • Commercial and open source products
  • Oracle Corporation, closed source, and forking (from 2010)
  • Version history
  • Operating system support
  • See also
  • Notes
  • References
  • Bibliography
  • External links

ZFS (previously Zettabyte File System) is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris, including ZFS, were published under an open source license as OpenSolaris for around 5 years from 2005 before being placed under a closed source license when Oracle Corporation acquired Sun in 20092010. During 2005 to 2010, the open source version of ZFS was ported to Linux, Mac OS X (continued as MacZFS) and FreeBSD. In 2010, the illumos project forked a then-recent version of OpenSolaris, including ZFS, to continue its development as an open source project. In 2013, OpenZFS was founded to coordinate the development of open source ZFS. OpenZFS maintains and manages the core ZFS code, while organizations using ZFS maintain the specific code and validation processes required for ZFS to integrate within their systems. OpenZFS is widely used in Unix-like systems.

== Overview == The management of stored data generally involves two aspects: the physical volume management of one or more block storage devices (such as hard drives and SD cards), including their organization into logical block devices as VDEVs (ZFS Virtual Device) as seen by the operating system (often involving a volume manager, RAID controller, array manager, or suitable device driver); and the management of data and files that are stored on these logical block devices (a file system or other data storage). Example: A RAID array of 2 hard drives and an SSD caching disk is controlled by Intel's RST system, part of the chipset and firmware built into a desktop computer. The Windows user sees this as a single volume, containing an NTFS-formatted drive of their data, and NTFS is not necessarily aware of the manipulations that may be required (such as reading from/writing to the cache drive or rebuilding the RAID array if a disk fails). The management of the individual devices and their presentation as a single device is distinct from the management of the files held on that apparent device.

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