OpenZFS Native Encryption Use Raises Data Corruption Concerns

At the end of last year OpenZFS 2.2.2 was released to fix a rare but nasty data corruption issue but it turns out there are other data corruption bug(s) still lurking in the OpenZFS file-system codebase.

A Phoronix reader wrote in today about an OpenZFS data corruption bug when employing native encryption and making use of send/recv support. Making use of zfs send on an encrypted dataset can cause one or more snapshots to report errors. OpenZFS data corruption issues in this area have apparently been known for years.

Since May 2021 has been this open issue around ZFS corruption related to snapshots on post-2.0 OpenZFS. That issue remains open.

A new ticket has been opened for OpenZFS as well in proposing to add warnings against using ZFS native encryption and the send/receive support in production environments.

"Among experienced zfs users and developers, it's conventional wisdom that zfs native encryption is not suitable for production usage, particularly when combined with snapshotting and zfs send/recv. There is a long standing data corruption issue with many firsthand user reports...Additionally, if you join #zfs or #zfsonlinux on freenode and mention that you're having an issue with zfs native encryption, you'll be met with advice from developers that zfs native encryption is simply not reliable."

There's no official comment on that warning proposal, but just passing along these details for those that may be using OpenZFS in production (or considering so) and to be aware of possible data corruption cases while using native encryption support.