Apparently Jeff Bonwick (CTO of Sun Storage Technologies and head of the ZFS project) and Linus Torvalds met early in May to discuss "something".

While Bonwick's blog post is quite cryptic and ends with "All I can say for the moment is... stay tuned", he left a few clues:

* The blog entry is titled "Casablanca" (obviously referring to the quote: "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship")
* The entry is filed under "ZFS"
* He talks about peanut butter on chocolate and vice versa

With all these hints, it's quite hard not to think about an integration of ZFS into the Linux kernel. In case you didn't follow the discussion around ZFS: The Zettabyte File System is a 128-bit filesystem developed by Sun and published as open source under the CDDL. It's well known for some superior features like support for high storage capacities, copy-on-write, snapshots and clones. Because of patent issues and license problems ZFS can't be integrated into the Linux kernel. I'm wondering if Sun is planning to change it's license and patent policy regarding ZFS.

I'd love to see Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex+1 booting from a ZFS partition.

In opposite to older releases, VirtualBox 1.6.0 seems to be quite stable and fast.

Since it's now Sun's property, I thought it might be a good idea to test OpenSolaris Indiana as a guest system.

Indiana is Sun's new "default" OpenSolaris Distribution. It's a full-fledged desktop operating system, including a Gnome-Desktop, a live-CD and a graphical installer.

Booting from VirtualBox is really simple, OpenSolaris uses Grub as boot-manager. One drawback: OpenSolaris Grub detects a already installed windows system, but it doesn't add already installed Linux Distributions to the boot-manager.

The Live-CD did start without any problems, however it took quite a time on my not-so-new equipment. While a Ubuntu Hardy VM starts in two or three minutes, it took Indiana nearly 15 minutes to present a graphical desktop.

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