Help testing ZFS v28 in FreeBSD

Pawel Jakub Dawidek has released a patch [1] to test ZFS version 28 in FreeBSD development version (9-CURRENT).
The patch is highly experimental and not guaranteed to work correctly. We want to correct any bugs and issues related to this patch.

What is new in v28 (compared to v15)?

  • data deduplication
  • triple parity RAIDZ
  • removal of log devices
  • zfs diff
  • zpool split
  • snapshot holds

You can read more about various ZFS pool versions in my previous article [2]. Continue reading

ZFS version 15 in FreeBSD

ZFS - The last word in file systemsAfter several weeks of testing and a discussion at the meetBSD 2010 conference I have successfully imported into the FreeBSD operating system (development branch 9-CURRENT) an update of the ZFS file system to version 15.

What is new in this version?

1. Stability – more mature ZFS code, comparable to Solaris 10 update 8 with latest bugfixes
2. Compatibility – Solaris 10 update 8 default ZFS pools can now be imported into FreeBSD
3. Features – user and group quotas (ZFS-internal) are very useful for intranet fileservers that want to use ZFS
4. Speed – my real-world benchmarks give a 15-20% RPS yield in PHP webserver workloads with codebase on ZFS

The new version will take 2 months of testing and if there are no serious issues I will import it on 2010-09-12 into the 8-STABLE branch. Continue reading

mfsBSD talk at the meetBSD 2010 conference

mfsBSD - meetBSD 2010 Kraków
mfsBSD talk at the meetBSD 2010 conference in Kraków

Following the success of the last year’s talk at the EuroBSDCon 2009 conference in Cambridge, UK I have presented my mfsBSD project at the meetBSD 2010 conference in Kraków, Poland on July, 3rd.

The conference was very successful and once again, I have met many known people from the FreeBSD project including Paweł Jakub Dawidek who I work with on importing new ZFS versions to FreeBSD, Warner Losh, FreeBSD Security Officer and FreeBSD Core Team member or Dru Lavigne, chair of the BSD Certification Group. The talks were mainly about different parts of the FreeBSD operating system, its deployment by large scale companies and some new innovative approaches were presented, too.

The presentation is available on youtube.com Continue reading