The future of ZFS in FreeBSD

[Steven Hartland]

Sorry been off for a few weeks so must have missed that, please do prod me
on again if you don’t see any response to anything not just this. Like many
others I get so may emails across so many lists it’s more than likely I
just missed it.

That said would you say that with the right support we can make progress on
the this prior to the port? I have to ask as the alternative version has
been on the cusp for many years now so it’s feels more like a distant
memory than something that may happen, no disrespect to anyone involved, as
I know all too well how hard it can be to get something like this over the
line, especially when people have competing priorities.


On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 at 22:52, Matthew Macy <mmacy at freebsd.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 14:47 Steven Hartland <killing at multiplay.co.uk>
> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the write up most appreciated. One of the more meaty
>> differences is that FreeBSD ZFS still has the only merged and production
>> ready TRIM support so my question would be are their any plans to address
>> this before creating the new port as going back to a world without TRIM
>> support wouldn’t be something I’d look forward to.
>>
>
> Well, then please follow up on the request I CC'd you on a week ago asking
> that you engage on the deadlist based TRIM  PR. That's a better forum for
> discussing these details than lamenting in public lists.
>
> Thanks.
>
> -M
>
>
>
>
>> On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 at 06:51, Matthew Macy <mmacy at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>
>>> 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
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>