Canonical to bake OpenZFS into Ubuntu 16.04

'Perfect' file system for containers to be fully supported in April's Ubuntu release

Canonical is planning to build ZFS, the resilient combined file system and logical volume manager originally developed by Sun Microsystems, into its forthcoming 16.04 release of the Ubuntu operating system, codenamed "Xenial Xerus".

Support for OpenZFS was added as a technical preview to Ubuntu 15.10, which was formally released at the beginning of May 2015. Users will still need to download and install the appropriate package, though - zfsutils-linux.

Xenial Xerus is scheduled to be released on 21 April and will likely include the Unity 8 graphical user interface and Mir.

"ZFS is one of the most beloved features of Solaris, universally coveted by every Linux sysadmin with a Solaris background. To our delight, we're happy to make OpenZFS available on every Ubuntu system," revealed Canonical product and strategy team member Dustin Kirkland in a blog post this week.

"Killer" features, according to Kirkland, include snapshots, copy-on-write cloning, continuous integrity checking against data corruption, automatic repair and efficient data compression. "These features truly make ZFS the perfect files ystem for containers," he added.

However, these features come at a cost in terms of memory - ZFS can be highly resource intensive, requiring 1GB of memory, as a rule of thumb, for every 1TB of storage under management.

Ubuntu 16.04 will also dump the not especially well-loved Ubuntu Software Centre in favour of Gnome Software. Unlike app stores for the Apple iOS operating system and the Google Play store, the sale of paid-for apps didn't prove to be a ginormous money-spinner for Canonical and the service has slowly deteriorated.

ZFS was originally developed as open-source software, although the ZFS name is trademarked to Oracle.