Testing of ZFS v28 for FreeBSD begins

Pawel Jakub Dawidek completed porting the latest version of the ZFS file system to FreeBSD and encouraged enthusiasts to take part in testing the code before integrating it into the FreeBSD HEAD code base. It is separately reported that despite the stagnation of the OpenSolaris project, work on ZFS in FreeBSD will continue on its own, for this a good development team has already been selected, some of which previously participated in the development of OpenSolaris, and several companies expressed their interest in the project. Much attention will also be paid to cooperation with the IllumOS project , within the framework of which a branch from the OpenSolaris code base has been created completely free and developed by an independent community of developers.

Of the features of ZFS v28 can be noted:

• Support for automatic recognition and combining of duplicate data. If several files contain similar data blocks, they will be saved on physical media only once, which will significantly reduce disk space consumption and increase productivity - instead of copying blocks, only the record in the corresponding table will be changed.
  
• Support for RAIDZ3 , a variant of RAIDZ with three copies that are responsible for ensuring the integrity of structures, which can significantly increase storage reliability compared to RAID modes with double redundancy - RAID-6 and RAIDZ2. For example, RAIDZ3 ensures data integrity while simultaneously leaving three disks standing up at once and improves the reliability of storage during rebuilding of the array after replacing the disk;
  
• Support for the " zfs diff " utility , which allows you to view a list of changes between two ZFS snapshots or between a snapshot and the current state of the FS. The utility displays the facts of changes, renaming, creating and deleting files and directories;
  
• Support for the zpool split command , designed to split a mirrored zpool partition into several separate pools. This feature, for example, allows you to simplify data cloning when several disks are added to the mirror, synchronization is performed and disks are excluded from the pool, after which the disks contain a complete copy of the data and can be used to load similar servers. Using zpool split, you can easily exclude a disk from the pool and then create a new pool based on it;
  
• Support for maintaining a snapshot reference counter for more flexible management of the removal of unused snapshots. For example, by increasing the counter, the user may notice that the snapshot is in use and cannot be deleted;
  
• Support for the “zpool import -F” command, which allows you to rewind a damaged pool to a state corresponding to an earlier transaction group;
  
• Ability to import a pool in read-only mode;
  
• Performance optimization work and bug fixes.