OpenZFS 2.1-rc1 Released With Distributed Spare RAID "dRAID"

The first release candidate of the forthcoming OpenZFS 2.1 file-system for Linux and FreeBSD systems is now available for testing.

Compared to the OpenZFS 2.0 release at the end of November, OpenZFS 2.1 is a much smaller feature release but still with a few significant changes.

First up, OpenZFS 2.1 is bringing a new feature called Distributed Spare RAID (dRAID). OpenZFS' Distributed Spare RAID is described as a "pool configuration [that] allows all dRAID vdevs to participate when rebuilding to a distributed hot spare device. This can substantially reduce the total time required to restore full parity to pool with a failed device." In tests by the developers they found dRAID needed 25% less time to resilver compared to a traditional hot spare. OpenZFS 2.1 will allow a dRAID pool to be created using the new "draid" top-level type. This Distributed Spare RAID feature has been in the works for more than one year.

OpenZFS 2.1-rc1 also introduces a new "compatibility" property for Zpool feature sets. This property is to "allow sets of features to be specified; for compatibility with specific versions / releases / external systems. Influences the behavior of 'zpool upgrade' and 'zpool create'."

The third feature found with OpenZFS 2.1-rc1 is the "zpool_influxdb" command for assisting in the collection of Zpool statistics into the InfluxDB time-series database.

Those are the main feature changes to find with OpenZFS 2.1-rc1 available as of Monday night.

OpenZFS 2.1-rc1 can be downloaded from GitHub. OpenZFS 2.1-rc1 has been verified to work through the Linux 5.11 kernel and on FreeBSD 12.2/13.0.