ZFS Is for 1337 Hax0rz
The developers of ZFS are a funny bunch of people. You can tell that by watching the “ZFS: The Next Word” talk, meeting them on conferences, reading their blogs or their comments on mailing lists.
And there are also some funny parts in the ZFS source code, too. In fact, if you use ZFS, you’ll have a funny joke sitting on your disk, right under your nose!
I was reminded about this particular joke while listening to Ulrich Gräf’s excellent talk on ZFS internal data structures during OSDevCon 2009 (no link, osdevcon.org no longer exists) (watch a video of Ulrich’s talk here (no link, sun.com no longer exists)).
But first, we need to dig a little bit into the world of ZFS data structures.