Illumos future and compatibility with Open-ZFS

["gea@napp-it.org" <gea@napp-it.org>]

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*There are very good reasons to prefer Illumos ZFS over Open-ZFS like*

- Stability
especially with OmniOS and a bloody,stable,long term stable and a 
repository for each

- Easyness
there is one current Illumos with one current ZFS
not the versions chaos of Open-ZFS with a douzen of distributions, each 
with its own problems and update paths to Open-ZFS newest.

- Efficiency
the deep OS Integration makes ZFS on Illumos very resource efficient

- Services like Kernel SMB or Comstar iSCSI
especially the kernelbased SMB server is for me the only thinkable 
alternative to a Windows Server when it comes to ACL compatibility or 
simplicity. SAMBA is a pain compared to the kernelbased SMB.


*But now the great BUT*

Open-ZFS is where the music plays with a lot of new features like ZSTD, 
Draid, Raid-Z Expansion or Fast Dedup and more to come. Lack of them 
means that you can no longer import a current Open-ZFS pool in Illumos 
and more important, these are killer features in some cases and therefor 
a criteria to use or not to use Illumos.

If you look at the flavours of "Open-ZFS" with independent repositories, 
there are mainly three:

1. Open-ZFS Master (BSD, Linux), currently 2.2.6
no longer a common roof for "Open" ZFS development but the place where 
development happens

2. Based on an older Open-ZFS and incompatible to newest Open-ZFS
Illumos and Qnap

3. Open-ZFS on Windows (and OSX), beta/release candidates
This is fork of Open-ZFS that is updated to Open-ZFS Master from release 
candidate to release candidate. While I suppose Jorgen Lundman 
(maintainer) originally planned a full integration of Windows ZFS 
directly into Open-ZFS, it seems that he now intends to use Open-ZFS 
simply as upstream, just like Illumos was upstream for a long time for 
BSD and Linux.

*
I want to ask.*
When I look at the Illumos Issue tracker, I see mainly small fixes, 
hardly new features does not matter regarding Illumos services or 
Open-ZFS features. I suppose number of devs is limited.

*What is the future idea of Illumos? *
-Be like Qnap and do not care about Open-ZFS and add one or the other 
new feature from time to time?
-Try something like BSD or Windows or OSX (switch to Open-ZFS as full 
upstream)?

I know a switch to Open-ZFS as upstream is not easy and can last and I 
am not even sure if it is really wanted or possible with current 
resources. But maybe this is the only option to make Illumos future proof?

Gea




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