The future of ZFS in FreeBSD

The sources for FreeBSD's ZFS support are currently taken directly from Illumos with local ifdefs to support the peculiarities of FreeBSD where the Solaris Portability Layer (SPL) shims fall short. FreeBSD has regularly pulled changes from Illumos and tried to push back any bug fixes and new features done in the context of FreeBSD. In the past few years the vast majority of new development in ZFS has taken place in DelphixOS and zfsonlinux (ZoL). Earlier this year Delphix announced that they will be moving to ZoL https://www.delphix.com/blog/kickoff-future-eko-2018 This shift means that there will be little to no net new development of Illumos. While working through the git history of ZoL I have also discovered that many races and locking bugs have been fixed in ZoL and never made it back to Illumos and thus FreeBSD. This state of affairs has led to a general agreement among the stakeholders that I have spoken to that it makes sense to rebase FreeBSD's ZFS on ZoL. Brian Behlendorf has graciously encouraged me to add FreeBSD support directly to ZoL https://github.com/zfsonfreebsd/ZoF so that we might all have a single shared code base. A port for ZoF can be found at https://github.com/miwi-fbsd/zof-port Before it can be committed some additional functionality needs to be added to the FreeBSD opencrypto framework. These can be found at https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18520 This port will provide FreeBSD users with multi modifier protection, project quotas, encrypted datasets, allocation classes, vectorized raidz, vectorized checksums, and various command line improvements. Before ZoF can be merged back in to ZoL several steps need to be taken: - Integrate FreeBSD support into ZoL CI - Have most of the ZFS test suite passing - Complete additional QA testing at iX We at iX Systems need to port ZoL's EC2 CI scripts to work with FreeBSD and make sure that most of the ZFS Test Suite (ZTS) passes. Being integrated in to their CI will mean that, among other things, most integration issues will be caught before a PR is merged upstream rather than many months later when it is MFVed into FreeBSD. I’m hoping to submit the PR to ZoL some time in January. This port will make it easy for end users on a range of releases to run the latest version of ZFS. Nonetheless, transitioning away from an Illumos based ZFS is not likely to be entirely seamless. The stakeholders I’ve spoken to all agree that this is the best path forward but some degree of effort needs to be made to accommodate downstream consumers. The current plan is to import ZoF and unhook the older Illumos based sources from the build on April 15th or two months after iX systems QA deems ZoF stable - which ever comes later. The Illumos based sources will be removed some time later - but well before 13. This will give users a 3 month period during which both the port and legacy Illumos based ZFS will be available to users. Pools should interoperate between ZoF and legacy provided the user does not enable any features available only in ZoF. We will try to accommodate any downstream consumers in the event that they need that date pushed back. We ask that any downstream consumers who are particularly sensitive to changes start testing the port when it is formally announced and report back any issues they have. I will do my best to ensure that this message is communicated to all those who it may concern. However, I can’t ensure that everyone reads these lists. That is the responsibility of -CURRENT users. -M