So in case you've not heard, Oracle made some changes to the way OpenSolaris was being released that basically for practical sakes killed that branch of open source Solaris and with it our primary way of doing production level ZFS. For lower cost anyway.
So we've been tracking these developments very closely in looking for a solid ZFS solution for what we use it for: dedupe and backups of our cluster filesystems.
FreeBSD version v28 ZFS has been added to 8-STABLE as a patch and so far seems pretty solid. Some outstanding work for those that want a quick install (and even root filesystems on ZFS) is located here .
For those that like to build their own, the patch area listed there should be tracked against the SVN checkout of FreeBSD or it doesn't quite apply properly.
But the cool part is after those patches you do indeed get a v28 capable ZFS in 8-STABLE.
bsd81# zpool upgrade -v This system is currently running ZFS pool version 28. The following versions are supported: VER DESCRIPTION --- -------------------------------------------------------- 1 Initial ZFS version 2 Ditto blocks (replicated metadata) 3 Hot spares and double parity RAID-Z 4 zpool history 5 Compression using the gzip algorithm 6 bootfs pool property 7 Separate intent log devices 8 Delegated administration 9 refquota and refreservation properties 10 Cache devices 11 Improved scrub performance 12 Snapshot properties 13 snapused property 14 passthrough-x aclinherit 15 user/group space accounting 16 stmf property support 17 Triple-parity RAID-Z 18 Snapshot user holds 19 Log device removal 20 Compression using zle (zero-length encoding) 21 Deduplication 22 Received properties 23 Slim ZIL 24 System attributes 25 Improved scrub stats 26 Improved snapshot deletion performance 27 Improved snapshot creation performance 28 Multiple vdev replacements
We are doing heavy testing to make sure its reliable and watching for a formal commit.
On the Linux ZFS front we continue to watch closely the efforts of the native kernel module. While we have no issue with the FUSE approach, we like to have as many options as we can. We have used the FUSE modules for ZFS successfully.
That work continues at the primary release site and the ZPL portion was recently added to a development branch. We are testing that as well under Centos based kernels.
Finally, we watch two OpenSolaris based spin-offs just to cover all the bases:
And Nexenta's release of the core OS.
