ZFS

ZFS
Developer(s)Sun Microsystems originally, Oracle Corporation since 2010, OpenZFS since 2013
VariantsOracle ZFS, OpenZFS
IntroducedNovember 2005 (2005-11) with OpenSolaris
Structures
Directory contentsExtendible hashing
Limits
Max volume size256 trillion yobibytes (2128 bytes)
Max file size16 exbibytes (264 bytes)
Max no. of files
  • Per directory: 248
  • Per file system: unlimited
Max filename length1023 ASCII characters (fewer for multibyte character standards such as Unicode)
Features
ForksYes (called "extended attributes", but they are full-fledged streams)
AttributesPOSIX, extended attributes
File system
permissions
Unix permissions, NFSv4 ACLs
Transparent
compression
Yes
Transparent
encryption
Yes
Data deduplicationYes
Copy-on-writeYes
Other
Supported
operating systems

ZFS (previously Zettabyte File System, now an orphaned initialism) 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 in 2005. During 2005 to 2010, the open source version of ZFS was ported to Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD. After Oracle Corporation acquired Sun in 2009–2010, they terminated the OpenSolaris project and ceased releasing source code. In response, the illumos project forked 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.