OpenZFS Support Merged Into Mainline FreeBSD

Following ongoing work for over a year on moving to OpenZFS for FreeBSD's ZFS file-system support, FreeBSD HEAD overnight has imported the OpenZFS code-base.

Earlier this year OpenZFS saw the FreeBSD support added. In the months since OpenZFS has continued seeing BSD improvements as well as other improvements on its own like Zstd compression for OpenZFS.

The milestone now being crossed is the OpenZFS file-system code is imported into FreeBSD HEAD.

The import spells out, "The primary benefit is maintaining a completely shared code base with the community allowing FreeBSD to receive new features sooner and with less effort. I would advise against doing 'zpool upgrade' or creating indispensable pools using new features until this change has had a month+ to soak."

By switching to OpenZFS, FreeBSD is able to tap new features that were not available in the Illumos ZFS code like the new Zstd compression, vectorized RAIDZ, vectorized checksums, project quotas, encrypted datasets, allocation classes, and more.

OpenZFS in FreeBSD adds to the list of changes building up for the eventual FreeBSD 13 release. This OpenZFS work for FreeBSD was driven in large part by iXsystems.