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You’ve probably heard us say a mix of “ZFS” and “OpenZFS” and an explanation is long-overdue. Our Senior Analyst clears up what ZFS and OpenZFS refer to and how they differ.

I admit that we geeks tend to get caught up in the nuts and bolts of enterprise storage and overlook the more obvious questions that users might have. You’ve probably noticed that this blog and the FreeNAS blog refer to “ZFS” and “OpenZFS” seemingly at random when talking about the amazing file system at the heart of FreeNAS and every storage product that iXsystems sells. I will do my best to clarify what exactly these two terms refer to.

From its inception, “ZFS” has referred to the “Zettabyte File System” developed at Sun Microsystems and published under the CDDL Open Source license in 2005 as part of the OpenSolaris operating system. ZFS was revolutionary for completely decoupling the file system from specialized storage hardware and even a specific computer platform. The portable nature and advanced features of ZFS led FreeBSD, Linux, and even Apple developers to start porting ZFS to their operating systems and by 2008, FreeBSD shipped with ZFS in the 7.0 release. For the first time, ZFS empowered users of any budget with enterprise-class scalability and data integrity and management features like checksumming, compression and snapshotting, and those features remain unrivaled at any price to this day. On any ZFS platform, administrators use the zpool and zfs utilities to configure and manage their storage devices and file systems respectively. Both commands employ a user-friendly syntax such as‘zfs create mypool/mydataset’ and I welcome you to watch the appropriately-titled webinar “Why we love ZFS & you should too” or try a completely-graphical ZFS experience with FreeNAS.

Yes, ZFS is really as good as people say it is.

After enjoying nearly a decade of refinement by a growing group of developers around the world, ZFS became the property of database vendor Oracle, which ceased public development of both ZFS and OpenSolaris in 2010. Disappointed but undeterred, a group of OpenSolaris users and developers forked the last public release of OpenSolaris as the Illumos project. While most if not all users of Illumos and its derivatives are ZFS users, the majority of ZFS users are not Illumos users, thanks significantly in part to FreeNAS which uses the FreeBSD operating system. This imbalance plus several successful ZFS Day events led ZFS co-founder Matt Ahrens and a group of ZFS developers to announce the OpenZFS project, which would remain a part of the Illumos code base but would be free to coordinate development efforts and events around their favorite file system. ZFS Day has grown into the two-day OpenZFS Developer Summit and is stronger than ever, a testament to the passion and dedication of the OpenZFS community.

Oracle has steadily continued to develop its own proprietary branch of ZFS and Matt Ahrens points out that over 50% of the original OpenSolaris ZFS code has been replaced in OpenZFS with community contributions. This means that there are, sadly, two politically and technologically-incompatible branches of “ZFS” but fortunately, OpenZFS is orders of magnitude more popular thanks to its open nature. The two projects should be referred to as “Oracle ZFS” and “OpenZFS” to distinguish them as development efforts, but the user still types the ‘zfs’ command, which on FreeBSD relies on the ‘zfs.ko’ kernel module. My impression is that the terms of the CDDL license under which the OpenZFS branch of ZFS is published protects its users from any patent and trademark risks. Hopefully, this all helps you distinguish the OpenZFS project from the ZFS technology.

June 2019 Update

As readers have correctly pointed out, the role of ZFS on Linux a.k.a. “ZoL” is a hot topic. OpenZFS has been experiencing rapid development on Illumos, FreeBSD, and GNU/Linux in recent years which has led to feature inconsistency and potential feature incompatibility. Recognizing what a disservice OpenZFS fragmentation would be to the community, the OpenZFS Project leadership is discussing how to encourage OpenZFS feature compatibility through various mechanisms such as a month and year that represent a specific set of OpenZFS features that can be expected on multiple platforms. In parallel, iXsystems is upstreaming native FreeBSD support into the ZoL code base to make the ZoL code base truly platform-agnostic. This will help the OpenZFS project reach its goal of unification on a common upstream OpenZFS source code repo for all supported platforms. This is significant, considering that OpenZFS is undergoing testing on NetBSD and Windows and this work will allow FreeNAS 12 to deliver the latest OpenZFS features. Please help test the new OpenZFS kernel module and userland tools on FreeBSD to accelerate this unification!

Michael Dexter, Senior Analyst