ZFS Port: Community Bonding Report

I was busy with finals throughout the Community Bonding period, which left me with little time to work on GSoC-related tasks. I still have 3 exams left with the last one being on June 7. That's when the fun starts. For now I'm merely playing with ZFS on FreeBSD on a virtual machine. I still need to make my way through at least the ZFS On-Disk Specification. Even though the information contained in this document is not strictly required for porting ZFS to Haiku, it's a useful read nonetheless. It also makes me look like a rockstar when I open it in coffee shops.

According to my proposal, this is what comes next:

• Finish porting dependencies (libavl, libnvpair, libuutil, libumem).
• Begin writing an OpenSolaris compatibility layer. This involves studying how threads, mutexes, condition variables etc. work on Solaris and then writing wrappers that behave in a similar manner around the Haiku API.

This means approximately one week spent on porting and testing dependencies and a fair bit of time spent on learning about low-level Solaris interfaces. One week is an optimistic estimation for a port of any kind, but some of the dependencies are merely libraries that implement useful data structures. This means they might build on Haiku without major changes. I can't say anything further unless I've taken a better look at them myself. The end result of the quarter term should be an OptionalPackage that contains all the external ZFS dependencies.

June 7 is not far :)