OpenZFS 2.1 Released With dRAID, Compatibility Property, Better Performance

Shipping now as the successor to last November's big OpenZFS 2.0 release is OpenZFS 2.1 as quite a worthy follow-on release.

OpenZFS 2.1 introduces Distributed Spare RAID (dRAID) to allow creating pools using a distributed variant of RAIDZ for faster resilver times using integrated hot spares. The dRAID implementation allows for full redundancy to be restored in a "fraction of the time" normally required when carrying out a full disk replacement.

On the performance front OpenZFS 2.1 now scales worker threads with core counts, better handling during interactive I/O, optimized prefetch for parallel workloads, lower pool import times, reduced fragmentation from ZIL blocks, better memory management, and the kernel module will even load faster.

Also exciting with OpenZFS 2.1 is a new compatibility property for allowing admins to specify the set of features that can be enabled on the pool, which can help with ensuring compatibility between OpenZFS versions and platform coverage.

OpenZFS 2.1.0 is rounded out by InfluxDB support for pool statistics, various new options and sub-command improvements, enhanced man pages, support for memory and CPU hot-plugging, and more.

OpenZFS 2.1 supports running on Linux 3.10 through the newly released 5.13 kernels. On the FreeBSD front it works with FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE or newer. The macOS OpenZFS support for mainline is still in the works.

OpenZFS 2.1 can be downloaded from GitHub.