Projects

Active projects

Projects that are currently being worked on. Ideally these should each have a responsible engineer and a link to a design document or page explaining how they will work.

• resumable send/receive User:Csiden
• Storage of small files in dnode User:Mahrens
• Raspberry Pi support ( ryao is working on this)
  • Based on ZFS on Linux, which already works on ARM
  • Some unresolved issues with running out of kernel virtual address space

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 [1] 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

• device removal
  • based on indirect vdevs, rather than bprewrite
• Reflink[2] support
• Unified ashift handling [3]
• Collapsible ZAP objects (e.g. fatzip -> microzap downgrades)
• 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 [4]
  • 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 SLAB allocation for deduplication table entries (easy to implement; will reduce DDT entries from 512-bytes to 320-bytes).
• ZFS Channel Programs