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cm3

If you want to publish more ZFS articles, I'd love to read about following topics from Adam and/or members of OpenZFS:

- using DTrace for ZFS operations insight

- state of OpenZFS, comparing illumos, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Linux

- myths and/or often cited problems (ECC, COW unfit for DB load, VM images etc.)

- ZFS version and feature flags wrt portability between illumos and FreeBSD versions

- pool flexibility work that will make it easier to remove devices

- comparison to btrfs, hammer{1,2} and flash filesystems

- the topic of zfs pointer rewrite

- garbage collection and safely removing traces of a file/directory in a COW fs

- rebalancing story compared to HAMMER and future work in this space

- built-in ZFS encryption (independent of system crypto volume support)

I should say that I'd only support an article like that if Ars allows parts of the written text to be incorporated into OpenZFS wiki/documenation.

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Some of these are probably a little too deep to get much traction on the ars front page, but there are some solid ideas here (especially the oft-sited problems one). Thanks for the feedback!

We did run a big piece by Jim Salter a couple of years ago on next-gen file systems that focused on ZFS and btrfs (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/bitrot...), but yeah, I'd love to have more filesystem-level stuff showing up. The response is generally very, very strong—turns out people really like reading about file systems when the authors know what they're talking about!

edit -

> I should say that I'd only support an article like that if Ars allows parts of the written text to be incorporated into OpenZFS wiki/documenation.

That's more complicated, unfortunately. I am not a lawyer etc etc and I am only speaking generally here, but Ars and CN own the copyright on the pieces we run (though syndications like Adam's piece today are different), and wholesale reuse of the text without remuneration isn't something that the CN rights management people like. Fair use is obviously fine, so quoting portions of pieces as sources in documentation is not a problem, but re-using most or all of something isn't (necessarily or usually) fair use.

(again, not a lawyer, my words aren't gospel, don't take my word for it, etc etc)

I'm also not a lawyer, but my thought process is like this: in the open source spirit, given this is not a book to be profited from, and profiting from technical books is very hard anyway, developers of some software could contribute technical content which then instead of compensation would only get editor time and in return be allowed to be included in the project's documentation. Real World Haskell, Real World OCaml somehow managed to convince the publisher this is fine. Again, IANAL, just thinking out loud.

Allan Jude might be a viable candidate for some of the content, if he'd like to.

Also, Dr. McKusick documented some of the internals in his living FreeBSD kernel book, but as you said, this might be beyond Ars's scope.

Though, I've seen some deep technical content on Ars, so why not give it a try.

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