In summary, I think that Pawel and Marshall do a good job. Their overview of ZFS should be more than sufficient for anyone that reads ;login: but has managed to keep bunkered under a rock for long enough not to have seen the brochures.

On to the main course, though-- a summary of Pawel's work porting ZFS to FreeBSD. Reading it, I was surprised at how much I knew already. That said, I am surprised at how I did not put the clues together into a clearer plan for this summer's project. Specifically, I've known about (and read.. and discussed) FreeBSD's OpenSolaris compat layer. What I somehow did not correlate, though, is that most of the work I have slated for this summer will be limited to this layer. I anticipate that it will take me some time to grok the individual interfaces properly, but this is where my mentors are really likely to lend a hand.

So today-- optimism.

I could try to blame other factors for clouding my mind, but I think ultimately my project's "negative-slack" (a former professor's euphemism for schedule-crunch) is due to a lack of intimacy with the code, an aversion to premature assumptions, and, moreover, fear of failure. Completing my initial development plan, and getting some code committed will, I'm sure, give me some much-needed confidence and momentum. It's always interesting to me, though not surprising at all, how human factors manage to bleed into technical work.