This means that Debian will become one of the first projects outside Sun to support the filesystem.ZFS is a combined filesystem and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. It is now owned by Oracle.

According to the project, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a port that consists of GNU userland using the GNU C library on top of FreeBSD's kernel, coupled with the regular Debian package set.



Millan said in a post on his blog that while ZFS support had not been available in the beta1 images available for Squeeze, it was now available in the images for netbooting.



As Squeeze moves towards its release, the Debian team puts in place policies that ensure what packages can be incorporated into the distribution. This cutoff ensures that the release is not overly delayed.



Millan said that he had initially posted saying that Squeeze would not have ZFS support as the version of Parted, the package used for partitioning hard drives during installation, had not been migrated to Squeeze. And the release policy in place did not appear to allow this migration.



"However, the release team kindly decided to make an exception that allowed this, and after Parted had migrated the changes in Debian-Installer itself went in quite smoothly," he wrote.

(This article has been corrected to reflect the fact that support for ZFS will be in the GNU/kFreeBSd port of Debian.)