Projects

Resumable send/receive
illumos gate - Feature #2605: Partial/incremental ZFS send/receive - illumos.org

Work in progress by Chris Siden.

Storage of small files in dnode
Work in progress by Matt Ahrens.

Raspberry Pi® support
Based on ZFS on Linux, which already works on ARM.

Unresolved issues include: running out of kernel virtual address space.

Work in progress by Ryao.

Inter-platform coordination ideas
Ideas for projects that would help coordinate changes between platforms:


 * Mechanism for pull changes from one place to another
 * Make it easier to build, test, code review, and integrate ZFS changes into illumos
 * Cross-platform test suite
 * One sourcebase rather than porting STF to every platform?
 * Maybe integrate XFS Test Suite
 * Userland ZFS
 * we already have ztest / libzpool
 * want to expand this to also be able to test more of zfs in userland
 * want to be able to run /sbin/zfs, /sbin/zpool against userland implementation
 * want to be able to run most of testrunner (and/or STF) test suite against userland implementation
 * ZFS (ZPL) Version Feature Flags
 * Import ZFS on Linux sa=xattr into Illumos
 * /dev/zfs ioctl interface versioning
 * Ensure that future additions/changes to the interface maintain maximum compatibility with userland tools
 * Enable FreeBSD Linux jails / Illumos lx brandz to use ZFS on Linux utilities
 * Port ZPIOS to Illumos from ZFS on Linux
 * This requires a rewrite to stop using Linux interfaces.
 * Virtual machine images with OpenZFS (see discussion on talk page)
 * to easily try OpenZFS on a choice of distributions within a virtual machine
 * images could be built for running on public clouds
 * images for installing to real hardware

General feature ideas

 * ZFS Channel Programs
 * device removal
 * based on indirect vdevs, rather than bprewrite
 * Reflink support
 * Unified ashift handling
 * Raidz Hybrid Allocator (preferably compatible with pool version 29 for Solaris 10u11 compatibility)
 * 1MB blocksize (preferably compatible with pool version 32, as pool-feature-flag)
 * Replace larger ZIO caches with explicit pages.
 * Subproject: Document useful kernel interfaces for page manipulation on various platforms
 * Improved SPA namespace collision management
 * Mostly needed by virtual machine hosts
 * work in progress in Gentoo
 * Temporary pool names in zpool import
 * Temporary pool names in zpool create
 * TRIM Support
 * Realtime TRIM
 * Freespace TRIM
 * Walk metaslab space maps and issue discard commands to the vdevs.
 * Platform agnostic encryption support (preferably compatible with pool version 30, as pool-feature-flag)
 * The early ZFS encryption code published in the zfs-crypto repository of OpenSolaris.org could be a starting point. A copy is available from Richard Yao upon request.
 * Deduplication improvements
 * Bloom Filter
 * Use dedicated kmem_cache for deduplication table entries (easy to implement; will reduce DDT entries from 512-bytes to 320-bytes).

Lustre feature ideas
The Lustre project supports the use of ZFS as an Object Storage Target. They maintain their own feature request page with ZFS project ideas. Below is a list of project ideas that are well defined, benefit Lustre and have no clear benefit outside of that context.


 * Collapsible ZAP objects (e.g. fatzip -> microzap downgrades)
 * Data on Separate Devices
 * Large dnodes
 * TinyZAP

Awareness-raising ideas
… awareness of the quality, utility, and availability of open source implementations of ZFS.

Quality
Please add or discuss your ideas.

ZFS and OpenZFS in three minutes (or less)
A very short and light video/animation to grab the attention of people who don't yet realise why ZFS is an extraordinarily good thing.

For an entertaining example of how a little history (completely unrelated to storage) can be taught in ninety seconds, see Hohenwerfen Fortress - The Imprisoned Prince Bishop (context) (part of the ZONE Media portfolio).

A very short video for ZFS and OpenZFS might throw in all that's good, using plain english wherever possible, including:
 * very close to the beginning, the word resilience
 * verifiable integrity of data and so on
 * some basic comparisons (NTFS, HFS Plus, ReFS)

– with the 2010 fork in the midst but (blink and you'll miss that milestone) the lasting impression from the video is that ZFS is great (years ahead of the alternatives) and OpenZFS is rapidly making it better for a broader user base.

Hint: there exist many ZFS-related videos but many are a tad dry, and cover a huge amount of content. Aim for two minutes :-) …  discuss…

Availability
Please add or discuss your ideas.

General
An OpenZFS channel on YouTube. Something more appealing and naturally better organised than the automatically generated ZFS channel.