OpenZFS File-System Merges Support For Using Zstd Compression

Adding to the list of software projects embracing Zstd for its very efficient compression abilities, OpenZFS is now supporting the Facebook-developed Zstandard as its latest file-system compression support.

Zstd compression for OpenZFS has been under review for several months as an alternative to the existing ZFS LZ4 and Gzip compression support. OpenZFS with Zstd has a compression ratio comparable to Gzip but with much greater performance, as we've seen with the likes of now the Linux kernel image supporting Zstd compression for speeding up boot times thanks to the decompression speed.

OpenZFS isn't the first to support Zstd for native file-system compression but can already be found as an option with the F2FS file-system as well as UBIFS, Btrfs, and even Reiser4.

The code merged this week to OpenZFS supports "zstd" as the Zstandard compression algorithm with compression levels from 1 to 19. There is also "zstd-fast" as a faster version of Zstd albeit with lower compression abilities.

More details on the Zstd compression support for ZFS (OpenZFS) via this commit. Great to see it finally merged!