The future of OpenZFS and FreeBSD

Looking at the recent changes to the OpenZFS Project, and how FreeBSD will interact with the OpenZFS Project going forward.

This talk will discuss:

• How the OpenZFS project started
• How the OpenZFS project has changed over the last 5 years
• The introduction of the monthly ZFS Leadership Call
• New problems as ZFS has matured (needing to add a deprecation policy, etc)
• How the OpenZFS project is working to reduce the differences across platforms (command line switches, NFS differences)
• Interoperability improvements (feature flag ‘compatibility’ groups)
• New procedures to prevent divergence and coordinate development across platforms (reserving flags, wider discussion before names for features/flags are decided)

Then switch gears and cover FreeBSD specific issues:

• The switch to ZoL as upstream
• Why we are making the change
• What we get out of it
• How it is better for all of OpenZFS

And finally a status report:

• ZFS-on-Linux and ZFS-on-FreeBSD are now “OpenZFS”
• There is no LinuxKPI in ZFS (kill the FUD)
• What has OpenZFS done for me lately (new and upcoming features)

Allan Jude

FreeBSD user (2001), doc (2014), and src (2015) committer. FreeBSD Core Team (2016-2020) Co-Author of “FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS” and “FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS” with Michael W. Lucas VP Engineering at Klara Inc (FreeBSD development and support services)