Ask HN: Why not AI assisted ZFS rewrite?
If folks are doing a clean room rewrite of Adobe {Photoshop, et al}, MS Office, Fusion CAD etc, why don’t someone who works on filesystems do a clean room rewrite of ZFS and upstream it to the Linux kernel? BcacheFS was exciting until the core dev fought his way out of the Linux kernel. ZFS works great but has no legal pathway into the Linux kernel. But, Now that LLMs can largely write code faster under the watchful guidance of experienced engineers who knows what to do, why not wield that power to create something that is like ZFS but not encumbered by Oracle and have it part of Linux kernel?
I know the usual caveats about file systems, needing to be mature, battle tested and that vibe coding file systems is not the greatest of ideas.. if _I_ were to unilaterally vibe code a ZFS with LLMs and tell folks to use it, it will be colossally stupid. I mean it as a wide open source project with participation from the right people with an open mind.
4 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 18.0 ms ] threadBoth bcachefs and ZFS are social problems, not technical. Nothing stops a distro from shipping ZFS as part of their kernel. Except a legal interpretation of whether CDDL and GPL2.0 allow that marriage.
The biggest attractor towards BcacheFS for me was the possibility of that cohesion. All the technical merits were a bonus as ZFS does already what I wish for. That factor went away with BcacheFS choosing to not get mainlined into Linux Kernel. Now we have two good filesystems outside the kernel :-(
It becomes drama when the leakiness isn’t acknowledged and instead the energy is converted to last minute bugfixes.