Good luck. There is long road ahead.

Both ZFS and Btrfs were initially developed by really high caliber people and experts with good track record. ZFS had five years for full time development until release, next five years to get close to the features and stability that ZFS has now. Btrfs started 10 years ago and it's still trying to catch up.

I think you think to highly of the btrfs group. There not bad people but Filesystems are HARD to get right and they simply are not in the same league as the zfs developers were. The well known raid 5 issue btrfs had shows a prime example that the btrfs simply is not in the same class as zfs' design.

I wouldn't compare the two.

eriknstr

I use ZFS under FreeBSD but I am wondering what the future of ZFS looks like.

I went to the OpenZFS website (http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Main_Page) to try and get a feel for the amount of work currently going on. They have some videos and slides, they have a mailing list. The mailing list is mostly full of messages via GitHub but at least that lead me to https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs which I was previously unaware of and which I had not found when trying to look for an OpenZFS specific repository.

As far as I have come to understand, the goal of the OpenZFS project is to merge changes made to ZFS by Illumos, FreeBSD, ZFS-on-Linux and other projects. Their videos might answer this but I wish their website had a clear and simple overview of what has been done. Most of what I can find on their wiki is various ideas for things that they want to do, but I can't know if that means that the OpenZFS project is mostly talk and not so much action, or if it's just that they have done a lot of those things but because they are busy doing they don't have time to write about it. Could be that they have some pages on the wiki I haven't seen also but in that case I think it should be organized better.

I know that Joyent picked up several highly skilled software engineers and programmers that used to work for Sun, and that their SmartOS operating system builds on code descendant from OpenSolaris and that ZFS is as integral on SmartOS as it was on Solaris, perhaps even more so on SmartOS. I have not seen mention of SmartOS on the OpenZFS wiki though.

All in all I feel that ZFS is still being actively developed and maintained by many people. But to what extent they are able to cooperate as much as a lot of them seem to want to I would like to know. It would be a shame if btrfs overtook ZFS simply because the development of ZFS was too fragmented :/

thatcks

The various Illumos distributions routinely upstream their changes into the master Illumos repository ( https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate). I know that ZFS on Linux (https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs) routinely integrates those changes, as well as making some of its own and I believe pushing them upstream to Illumos. When I've looked at FreeBSD commit logs, they too are pulling in ZFS changes from Illumos on a frequent basis (but I know less about any independent development and upstreaming).

My strong impression is that the ZFS code base is a sufficiently big and tangled thing that no one wants it to fragment. With bug-fixes and improvements happening in Illumos, ZoL and FreeBSD both want to be able to incorporate them on a regular basis and to push their own changes upstream to reduce the maintenance burden of carrying those changes.