Ubuntu's Zsys For OpenZFS Linux Installs Sees First Update In A Year

Ahead of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS shipping next week, a new version of their Zsys daemon/client for ZFS-based Linux installations has been issued.

When Ubuntu began supporting OpenZFS-based installs of the distribution they talked it up heavily and began working on Zsys and other integration around OpenZFS on Ubuntu. But more recently interest in OpenZFS on Ubuntu has clearly waned with it not seeing much development attention or promotion by Canonical. OpenZFS by default also never materialized and the licensing situation around OpenZFS with the Linux kernel remains murky.

Six years ago with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, ZFS-based installs were promoted but these days seemingly of little interest at Ubuntu.

There hasn't been any major news to report on OpenZFS + Ubuntu integration in recent times, their experimental new desktop installer at least initially lacks/lacked OpenZFS support, and their Zsys client/daemon hasn't been seeing much work.

OpenZFS in general remains popular with some crowds for ZFS file-system support on Linux and obviously very popular with its FreeBSD usage, but Ubuntu/Canonical seem less enthusiastic about it in recent times.

Released last week was Zsys 0.5.9 as the first release of Zsys since last April with v0.5.8. The only change with this update is updating the ZFS Go bindings so they are compatible with OpenZFS 2.1. This fixes Zsys failing to start with a run-time error as seen on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. So now at least Zsys will work on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using the packaged OpenZFS 2.1. OpenZFS 2.1 has been out since last July.

Ubuntu Zsys activity over the past year.