ETA for ZFS v. 13 Merge From HEAD ?

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 6:39 PM, Pegasus Mc Cleaft <ken at mthelicon.com>wrote:

> Hi Adrian,
>
>   I am not sure, but I didnt think ZFS 13 was ever going to be merged into
> 7-stable. I thought the kernel memory requirements were to great (just going
> back in my memory on that one). Also, I think there are still a few bugs
> left with the zil being enabled (and/or prefetch) causing lockups on machine
> with a lot of IO. I know I have hit that bug a few times on my machine when
> using various torrent clients when they want to preallocate large amounts of
> diskspace.
>
>   I personally cant wait until a later version of ZFS is imported that
> supports encryption. I can finally say good-bye to our GEOM ELI USB drives
> for backups!! Never the less, I am quite thankfull to thoes involved in
> porting V13 to FreeBSD. Its a wonderfull improvement and my FS of choice
> when installing on new machines (especially zfs boot)


I think that you're touching on two entirely separate points here... What it
takes to upgrade ZFS in -STABLE and what it takes to bring ZFS modules in to
FreeBSD.

I sincerely hope that ZFSv13 is planned for -STABLE.  Last we left this
issue, testing and a few kernel improvements were in the way.  None of the
kernel improvements were going to change the API, so the project was doable
in -STABLE.  That said, time marches on, 8.0-RELEASE draws ever nearer.
When we were still several years out on 8.0 and ZFS was causing me more
problems, I was much more keen to push for the port.  I would still welcome
it with open arms, but I'm not convinced that anyone is going to push it
forward.

The issue of encryption (along with many other issues) is tied to the
ability of FreeBSD to compile and use ZFS modules.  Just like netgraph
modules extend the function of netgraph.ko and geom modules extend the base
geom function, ZFS is designed (in Solaris, at least) to take modules.  ZFS
encryption is a module.  I'm not clear on compression --- it would make
sense that it is a module, but it seemingly got copied into FreeBSD as a
core feature (and it may also be so in solaris).

Anyways... is there any plans to allow for ZFS modules in FreeBSD?