Some very important and much desired features with this release.
I would personally recommend waiting a few months before making the switch.
behlendorf released this 4 hours ago
New Features
-
Native encryption #5769 - The
encryptionproperty enables the creation of encrypted filesystems and volumes. The aes-256-ccm algorithm is used by default. Per-dataset keys are managed withzfs load-keyand associated subcommands. -
Raw encrypted ‘zfs send/receive’ #5769 - The
zfs send -woption allows an encrypted dataset to be sent and received to another pool without decryption. The received dataset is protected by the original user key from the sending side. This allows datasets to be efficiently backed up to an untrusted system without fear of the data being compromised. -
Device removal #6900 - This feature allows single and mirrored top-level devices to be removed from the storage pool with
zpool remove. All data is copied in the background to the remaining top-level devices and the pool capacity is reduced accordingly. -
Pool checkpoints #7570 - The
zpool checkpointsubcommand allows you to preserve the entire state of a pool and optionally revert back to that exact state. It can be thought of as a pool wide snapshot. This is useful when performing complex administrative actions which are otherwise irreversible (e.g. enabling a new feature flag, destroying a dataset, etc). -
Pool TRIM #8419 - The
zpool trimsubcommand provides a way to notify the underlying devices which sectors are no longer allocated. This allows an SSD to more efficiently manage itself and helps prevent performance from degrading. Continuous background trimming can be enabled via the newautotrimpool property. -
Pool initialization #8230 - The
zpool initializesubcommand writes a pattern to all the unallocated space. This eliminates the first access performance penalty, which may exist on some virtualized storage (e.g. VMware VMDKs). -
Project accounting and quota #6290 - This features adds project based usage accounting and quota enforcement to the existing space accounting and quota functionality. Project quotas add an additional dimension to traditional user/group quotas. The
zfs projectandzfs projectspacesubcommands have been added to manage projects, set quota limits and report on usage. -
Channel programs #6558 - The
zpool programsubcommand can be used to perform compound ZFS administrative actions via Lua scripts in a sandboxed environment (with time and memory limits). -
Pyzfs #7230 - The new pyzfs library is intended to provide a stable interface for the programmatic administration of ZFS. This wrapper provides a one-to-one mapping for the
libzfs_coreAPI functions, but the signatures and types are more natural to Python. -
Python 3 compatibility #8096 - The
arcstat,arcsummary, anddbufstatutilities have been updated to be compatible with Python 3. -
Direct IO #7823 - Adds support for Linux’s direct IO interface.
Performance
-
Sequential scrub and resilver #6256 - When scrubbing or resilvering a pool the process has been split into two phases. The first phase scans the pool metadata in order to determine where the data blocks are stored on disk. This allows the second phase to issue scrub I/O as sequentially as possible, greatly improving performance.
-
Allocation classes #5182 - Allows a pool to include a small number of high-performance SSD devices that are dedicated to storing specific types of frequently accessed blocks (e.g. metadata, DDT data, or small file blocks). A pool can opt-in to this feature by adding a special or dedup top-level device.
-
Administrative commands #7668 - Improved performance due to targeted caching of the metadata required for administrative commands like
zfs listandzfs get. -
Parallel allocation #7682 - The allocation process has been parallelized by creating multiple “allocators” per-metaslab group. This results in improved allocation performance on high-end systems.
-
Deferred resilvers #7732 - This feature allows new resilvers to be postponed if an existing one is already in progress. By waiting for the running resilver to complete redundancy is restored as quickly as possible.
-
ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) #6566 - New log blocks are created and issued while there are still outstanding blocks being serviced by the storage, effectively reducing the overall latency observed by the application.
-
Volumes #8615 - When a pool contains a large number of volumes they are more promptly registered with the system and made available for use after a
zpool import. -
QAT #7295 #7282 #6767 - Support for accelerated SHA256 checksums, AES-GCM encryption, and the new QAT Intel® C62x Chipset / Atom® C3000 Processor Product Family SoC.
See full list in the github
Also, there seem to be some pretty big “gotcha’s” involved with device removal, see the description here: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/pull/6900
This is why I always recommend reading the pull requests, as well as the various comments leading to the request. They often contain important information that isn’t documented anywhere else, unfortunately.