ZFSin: working with ZFS natively under Windows

Doing a search on Habra using the word ZFS, I found almost fifty articles one way or another mentioning a wonderful file system with that name. Separately, for example, we can mention the fairly up-to-date materials " ZFS on Linux: Leading from the Fields 2017 " and " ZFS - The Best File System (so far) ." I did this search query, that's why ...

For more than 7 years now people have been asking the question " how to access ZFS from Windows? ". And about 6 years of a sane and practical answer to this question did not exist. It's not even about performance, the very ability to at least natively read data in Windows from volumes formatted for the ZFS file system excites the brain of many techies and system administrators. And then one day an enthusiastdecided to change the gloomy state of affairs with the lack of ZFS support in the most popular consumer desktop OS. It is only strange that for the year this news has not yet reached Habr. I think it's worth fixing it.

And so meet - ZFSin , a native full-featured ZFS file system driver for Windows. Source codes are licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) . The driver is in the alpha stage and is not suitable for production environments, but already knows a lot.


RomanStrlcpy found a video from OpenZFS Summit 2017 where ZFSin was introduced:


When the driver project was only published on GitHub, it was still not clear how serious the intentions of the developer were, and how far he was ready to go in the development of driver capabilities. Initially, the driver was distributed only in the form of source texts and was suitable only for debugging experiments. To do this, the author suggested downloading and running two virtual machines , in one of which the driver was compiled and deployed to the second, a test (target) virtual machine with a ZFS test pool.

Current progress in driver functionality at the end of May 2018:



Now, after a year after the initial publication, the developer has demonstrated his intentions to develop the project, the functionality of the driver has been expanded, stability has increased, so it is possible to distribute binary assemblies in the driver . Although this is not explicitly stated, at the moment ZFSin binary assemblies are only compatible with Windows 10 x64 , however, recently the ability to generate 32-bit builds was returned to the source codes , and the author did not exclude the possibility of adding support for older versions of Windows.

Installing a binary release:

1. Download and unzip the latest driver release
2. Disable driver digital signature verification (for example, bcdedit.exe -set testsigning on ) and reboot
3. Run CMD as Administrator
4. Run ZFSinstall.bat
5. Select “continue installation anyway” in the “unknown publisher” pop-up
6. Run the command “zpool.exe status” to check the status of the driver

If the installation is successful, then after the last point you will see the message “ No pools available ”, if an error occurs, the message will be “ Unable to open \\. \ ZFS: No error. ” The

command syntax of the driver basically corresponds to that from the documentation for Open ZFS. For compatibility reasons, you should use a case-insensitive file system mode. I would really like to draw more attention of other programmers to this project, which the project certainly deserves. The developer of the ZFSin driver will be very happy with your bug reports, pool requests, or, at worst, the stars that you send to his repository on GitHub . UPD

# zpool create [options] tank disk
- создать пул из одного диска

# zpool create [options] tank mirror disk1 disk2
- создать зеркальный пул ("raid1")

# zpool create [options] tank raidz disk1 disk2 disk3 .... diskn
- создать raidz ("raid5")пул из нескольких дисков

zpool create -O casesensitivity=insensitive -O compression=lz4 -O atime=off -o ashift=12 tank disk
- пример рекомендуемой команды создания пула под Windows




The developer went to the requests and began publishing a 32-bit binary version of the driver.