FreeBSD Picks Up Support For ZFS ZCP: Carry Out Admin Tasks Via Lua Scripts

FreeBSD 12.0 will have initial support for ZFS Channel Programs (ZCP) for running administrative tasks on the file-system via Lua.

ZCP allows small Lua scripts to be executed for carrying out administrative tasks on the ZFS file-system for tasks like dropping old snapshots and other maintenance. The FreeBSD implementation does execute these commands in a sandboxed environment and enforces memory/time limits to fend off potential rogue Lua scripts.

Those wishing to learn more can see this FreeBSD commit from yesterday introducing the ZFS ZCP support. More details on ZCP are explained via the Open-ZFS Wiki.