I think it would be great if OpenSolaris had a compressed R/O FS like SquashFS. So +1 from a technical point of view.
However I have concerns about the licensing aspects. As I understand things, the GPL licence used by SquashFS is incompatible with the CDDL used by OpenSolaris. Is SquashFS currently ported to any other operating system apart from Linux? I have done a quick search regarding the BSD systems, and they do not seem to use it. SquashFs is not yet part of the mainline Linux Kernel, but that does seem to be the goal that Phillip Lougher is closing in on. See this link: http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Squashfs_Aiming_For_Mainline_Kernel Thomas does says he plans to write the driver from scratch, as a port of the Linux driver. And that to work out a specification for the driver, he would effectively have to 'reverse engineer' from the GPL code. Thomas also mentions that it would be useful to use the header structure files. But to do that Phillip, would need to be prepared to change the licence on those files. At this stage it's unclear if Phillip has any interested in doing this. Also, I wonder if there are there any patent issues regarding SquashFS? If licensing could be an issue, should that stop the creation of an OpenSolaris project? I don't know. I'm sorry if this sounds negative. I just think that this is an issue that should be raised. And the same issues are likely to apply to other 'free software' that people would like to see as a part of OpenSolaris. If anyone has experience of licensing issues, and thinks these point are irrelevant and that I'm talking rubbish, please jump and say so. But gently & politely please. Regards Nigel Smith This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
