An introduction to the implementation of ZFS - Kirk McKusick
Channel: EuroBSDcon
Date: 2019-10-14

Abstract:

Much has been documented about how to use ZFS, but little has been written about how it is implemented. This talk pulls back the covers to describe the design and implementation of ZFS. The content of this talk was developed by scouring through blog posts, tracking down unpublished papers, hours of reading through the quarter-million lines of code that implement ZFS, and endless email with the ZFS developers themselves. The result is a concise description of an elegant and powerful system.

Speaker biography:

Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick’s work with Unix and BSD development spans over four decades. It begins with his first paper on the implementation of Berkeley Pascal in 1979, goes on to his pioneering work in the eighties on the BSD Fast File System, the BSD virtual memory system, the final release of 4.4BSD-Lite from the UC Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group, and carries on with his work on FreeBSD. A key figure in Unix and BSD development, his experiences chronicle not only the innovative technical achievements but also the interesting personalities and philosophical debates in Unix over the past thirty-five years.