DTrace & ZFS Being Updated On NetBSD, Moving Away From Old OpenSolaris Code

The NetBSD operating system has been working on updating their DTrace and ZFS implementations.

Chuck Silvers with the NetBSD project has been working on updating their DTrace and ZFS code. Up to now NetBSD has been relying upon outdated ZFS/DTrace code that originated from the OpenSolaris code-base. As many of you know, OpenSolaris hasn't been a thing now for many years since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems.

In order to pull in newer ZFS and DTrace code, Chuck has been working to migrate over to FreeBSD's ZFS/DTrace code that is in a much better state. This picks up many fixes and enhancements for the ZFS file-system, adds mmap() support to ZFS on NetBSD, and the DTrace code re-base also presents more modern functionality.

On Thursday was the latest update for this code updating project. It's looking like the updated code will be committed soon unless any last minute objections arise.

NetBSD 8.0 is the next major feature release currently under development.

In other BSD news this morning but completely unrelated to the above content, DragonFlyBSD now has evdev support. This experimental evdev input device support for DragonFly comes via porting the code from FreeBSD's kernel.