Talk to Brian or Dennis on VDO team on how to use fstrim in an optimal fashion.

Unfortunately, existing VMFs aren’t easily used on enterprise Linux distributions like RHEL.ZFS isn’t an option RHEL can embrace due to licensing, Ubuntunotwithstanding. Btrfs has nolicensing issues, but maintaining up-to-date support for in it in enterprise kernels proved difficult.We can see from the many developer-years of effort that have gone into these two projectsthat writing a VMF is a tremendous, time-consuming undertaking. We also can hear our usersdemanding their features and ease of use.Rather than writing a new VMF from scratch, Stratis proposesto satisfy VMF-like require-ments by managing existing technologies on behalf of the user, so that users can manage theirstorage using high-level concepts like “pool” and “filesystem”, and remain unconcerned with themore complex details under the covers.This is also a chance to learn from the benefits and shortcomings of existing solutions. Weshould not just copy ZFS. ZFS is now fifteen years old and the storage landscape has changedsince its design. We seek to satisfy the same needs that ZFS does, but also integrate more tightlyinto today’s increasingly automated storage management solutions that span the data center aswell as the local machine. This is made possible by a hybrid, userspace-based approach.