When ZFS was young

ZFS was promised, and didn’t arrive. In fact, there were about 4 of us on the beta program who saw the original zfs implementation, and it was quite different from what we have now. What eventually landed as zfs in Solaris was a complete rewrite. The beta itself was interesting – we were sent the driver, 3 binaries, and a 3-line cheatsheet, and that was it. There was a fundamental philosophy here that the whole thing was supposed to be so easy to use and sufficiently obvious that it didn’t need a manual, and that was actually true. (It’s gotten rather more complex since, to be fair.)

Peter Tribble – long-time Solaris expert and creator of Tribblix – gives a gimpse into the earliest versions of ZFS, and just how different it was from the shipped release.

3 Comments

  1. 2023-10-10 9:46 am
    • 2023-10-11 4:59 am
  2. 2023-10-10 2:42 pm