OpenZFS is a storage platform that encompasses the functionality of traditional filesystems, volume managers, and more, with consistent reliability, functionality and performance across all distributions.
It was originally developed for Solaris and is now maintained by the OpenZFS community.
The OpenZFS project brings together developers from the Linux, FreeBSD, illumos, MacOS, and Windows platforms. OpenZFS is supported by a wide range of companies.
Key Features
- Protection against data corruption. Integrity checking for both data and metadata.
- Continuous integrity verification and automatic “self-healing” repair.
- Data redundancy with mirroring, RAID-Z1/2/3 [and DRAID].
- Support for high storage capacities — up to 256 trillion yobibytes (2^128 bytes).
- Space-saving with transparent compression using LZ4, GZIP or ZSTD.
- Hardware-accelerated native encryption.
- Efficient storage with snapshots and copy-on-write clones.
- Efficient local or remote replication — send only changed blocks with ZFS send and receive.
The suggested hardware requirements are:
- ECC memory. This isn’t really a requirement, but it’s highly recommended.
- 8GB+ of memory for the best performance. It’s possible to run with 2GB or less (and people do), but you’ll need more if using deduplication.
Website: openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs
Support: FAQ, GitHub Code Repository
Developer: OpenZFS community
License: Common Development and Distribution License
OpenZFS is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Journaling File Systems | |
|---|---|
| ext4 | Evolved from ext3 adding many notable features including extents |
| XFS | Designed to maintain high performance with large files and file systems |
| Btrfs | Checksumming Copy on Write File system |
| F2FS | Flash file system initially developed by Samsung Electronics |
| OpenZFS | Advanced file system and volume manager originally developed for Solaris |
| GFS2 | Shared disk file system for Linux computer clusters |
| ext3 | Default file system for many popular Linux distributions |
| JFS | Journaled File System |
| UBIFS | File system for raw flash memory used through UBI volumes |
| OCFS2 | Extent-based cluster file system |
| Bcachefs | Advanced file system ejected from the mainline kernel |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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