OpenZFS 3.0 Could See macOS Support & DirectIO, While ZFS For Windows Continues

The annual OpenZFS Developer Summit wrapped up yesterday with interesting talks on this open-source, cross-platform ZFS file-system implementation.

ZFS co-creator Matt Ahrens kicked things off as usual, including touching on future work and possible expectations for OpenZFS 3.0. Given the annual major release cadence, OpenZFS 3.0 is up next for the project that currently has support for Linux and FreeBSD systems. Some of the possible features expressed for OpenZFS 3.0 include macOS support, DirectIO, RAIDZ expansion, Linux namespaces, ZFS on object store, FIEMAP, VDEV properties, async DMU, and more. We'll see though next year ultimately what pans out for the next ZFS release.

Ahrens' OpenZFS Developer Summit 2021 update details can be found via this slide deck.

As already shared, the OpenZFS Developer Summit also hosted an update on the pending DirectIO support that might land for OpenZFS 3.0. OpenZFS' DirectIO support is looking quite good with speedy NVMe storage.

Another interesting talk from this virtual summit was on OpenZFS for Windows. OpenZFS "ZFSin" has been seeing much work over the past year including strides made on better encryption performance, perfmon counters, and other performance optimizations. More stability and performance optimizations for ZFS file-system support on Windows remains ongoing. Work still needs to happen to get the ZFSin changes back to the OpenZFS code-base so it could be upstreamed in the future. See the Windows status update via this slide deck.

See more of the presentations and other information around the OpenZFS Developer Summit 2021 via the OpenZFS.org Wiki.