OpenZFS 2.1 Adds Linux 5.13 and InfluxDB Support, Distributed Spare RAID

OpenZFS 2.1

OpenZFS, the free and advanced file system and volume manager for Linux and FreeBSD systems, has been updated today to version 2.1, a major release that adds exciting new features and improvements.

The biggest change of the OpenZFS 2.1 release is support for the recently launched Linux 5.13 kernel series. Of course, this means that you can use the ZFS file system on a GNU/Linux distribution powered by Linux kernel 5.13. Right now, OpenZFS is compatible with Linux kernels 3.10 to 5.13.

Other major new features of OpenZFS 2.1 include dRAID (distributed spare RAID) support for creating pools using a new distributed variant of RAIDZ, support for the InfluxDB time-series database for collecting pool statistics, and a new compatibility property that lets sysadmins specify a set of features to be enabled on the pool.

“This fine grained control makes it easy to create portable pools and maintain pool compatibility between OpenZFS versions and across platforms,” explained the devs.

Among other notable changes, this release adds CPU and memory hot-plugging support, updates the vdev_id option to support daisy-chained JBODs in multipath mode, and updates the arcstat option with new L2ARC statistics and two new command-line arguments, namely -a (all) and -p (parsable).

In addition, the acltype=posixacl option was renamed to acltype=posix and there’s now an alias for backward compatibility. Furthermore, OpenZFS now features automated ABI validation for public library interfaces and more modern man pages.

Under the hood, there’s a lot of changes to improve the performance for interactive I/O, memory management, module load time, and and scalability, as well as to reduce fragmentation from ZIL blocks and pool import time, and to optimize prefetch for parallel workloads.

Some changes were also made to the zpool and zfs commands, so check out the full changelog on the project’s GitHub page for more details. You can download OpenZFS 2.1 right now for your favorite distro from the official website.

Last updated 3 years ago

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