zfs and zpool programs successfully compile and link.

Beware -- long post.

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, I've been kind of busy with other stuff.. ;)

I have good news. As you can see from the title, the zfs and the zpool programs now successfully compile and link :)

There are 2 known functionality losses: Linux doesn't seem to have a libdiskmgt equivalent and porting it seems rather complicated if not almost impossible, so there is no "device in use" detection. If anyone knows a good way to solve this, I'm all ears :)

The other loss is the "whole disk" support. This must eventually be solved, since it's rather common in Solaris to dedicate a whole disk as a zpool vdev. I believe this can be circumvented for now by creating a partition that uses the whole disk, and create the zpool vdev using the partition device.

The specific problem is that ZFS uses EFI labels in disks. I only found one working EFI library for Linux, but the API is different from the OpenSolaris implementation. Once again, porting the EFI functionality from OpenSolaris proved to be difficult.

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Unfortunately the zfs and zpool programs don't do anything useful yet.

In the original implementation, they use the ioctl(2) system call through the /dev/zfs device to communicate with the kernel. Since this is a userlevel implementation, there will be no /dev/zfs.

In the zfs-fuse implementation, instead of using ioctl(), we communicate through a UNIX domain (local) socket which is created in /tmp/.zfs-unix/. So in order to make these commands actually do something, there must be a zfs-fuse process that answers the messages sent from zpool and zfs.

My plan to make zfs-fuse work is to take advantage of as much code from the original implementation as possible. Yes, this also means I want to use the original ZPL code. It seems to be the most reliable way to do it, and perhaps also the easiest one :)

In order to do that, I've created a libsolkerncompat library that will implement/translate the necessary OpenSolaris kernel code to make the ZPL work. This library will also be necessary in order to use the original zfs_ioctl.c implementation, since it uses some kernel VFS (Virtual File System) operations, along with other things.

This will also take some time to get it working, since a new zfs_context.h must be created or (more likely) the current zfs_context.h must be factored out to libsolkerncompat.

So, in a way, I can say I'm now in phase 3.5, since I'm actually working on the zfs-fuse process (which includes the necessary bits to make the ZPL code work), but I'm still not in phase 4, since zpool and zfs won't work until zfs_ioctl.c is ported.