We are only a couple of months away from the next major release of the world's most popular free operating system, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and some of its neat new features are yet to be revealed.

Canonical's Dustin Kirkland writes today about one of the awesome things that will be implemented by default in the upcoming Linux-based distribution, ZFS, the robust file system that everyone talks about these days, which Canonical will bake directly into Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Best of all, Canonical promises to offer long-term support for the ZFS file system in the Xenial Xerus operating system, which will receive security patches and software updates for five years, until April 2021, and from the looks of it, ZFS will be the default file system for containers in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

"Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial) is only a few short weeks away, and with it comes one of the most exciting new features Linux has seen in a very long time. ZFS -- baked directly into Ubuntu -- supported by Canonical," said Dustin Kirkland, Ubuntu Product and Strategy at Canonical.

Why ZFS is good for Ubuntu

For those of you who are not in the loop, we will take this opportunity to remind them that ZFS (also known as Z File System) is a groundbreaking file system originally designed for the Solaris operating system. It is a mix of a file system like Btrfs, EXT4, or XFS, and a volume manager, such as LVM (Logical Volume Management).

However, ongoing open source ZFS development takes place these days via the OpenZFS project, which Canonical will make available on every Ubuntu Linux operating system. And with features like snapshots, automatic repair, efficient data compression, and copy-on-write cloning, ZFS will be the perfect file system for containers.

If you want to know what kind of support Canonical will provide for the ZFS file system in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and how you can get started using it from day one, we recommend reading Mr. Kirkland's in-depth article with detailed examples of usage.