ZFS On Linux Looks Like It Will Soon Have Native Encryption Support

The ZFS file-system upstream has offered native encryption support but unfortunately it came after ZFS was closed up by Oracle. The Illumos folks have been working on ZFS encryption while it looks like soon there will finally be encryption support available for ZFS On Linux.

A Phoronix reader mentioned this weekend, "there has been talk on ZoL's github issue tracker about this feature for years, and nobody seemed willing to even begin to think about it mostly because licensing issues make such an implementation a very difficult task. However, one contributor seems to have landed initial patches for encryption support, making ZoL encryption compatible with the Illumos version, if I understand the issue tracker comments correctly. This came as a surprise to me, since up to a few months ago ZoL encryption seemed to be very far away."

There's been this feature request going back to 2011 for having encryption support for ZOL. Towards the end of that thread is Tom Caputi talking about his work on crypto support for ZOL. His last comment two weeks ago is that the ZFS encryption support is about ready to review but there are some buildbot issues to address.

This pull request has all of the details and it sure looks like ZFS On Linux encryption support will soon become a reality.