Ask HN: Why not AI assisted ZFS rewrite?

Just thinking out loud..

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.

1 points | by reacharavindh 1 hour ago

2 comments

  • sieve 2 minutes ago
    bcachefs exists outside of any drama. I switched my pools to it from ZFS last year and it is working swimmingly. What ZFS use case do you have that bcachefs does not solve? Only thing I can think of is zfs send/receive and I never used that.
  • solyin 1 hour ago
    The problem isn't the code. I could "just" cp -r openZFS into Linux/fs/zfs or whatever. The problem is the copyright owner is going to sue you, and I ain't got time for that headache, nor the money for the lawyer to defend that lawsuit. Which I'd probably lose. Laundering it through AI isn't enough to fend off that lawsuit.