status of ZFS?

[u-6hol%aetey.se@localhost]

Hello,

I made some effort to learn the current status of ZFS usability on
NetBSD. There did not seem to have been any discussions arount the topic
for the last couple of years. May be there is some hidden knowledge
available via this list?

(I am unfortunately not in a position to contribute to ZFS development
other than by testing and reporting.)

My results of digging the search engines and doing some trivial tests
on NetBSD 6.1.4 (GENERIC) i386, 1GHz CPU, 512M RAM:

- ZFS seems to be in a stalled WIP state

- it works in fact slightly better than stated in
  http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/external/cddl/osnet/TODO
  (e.g. zpools can be destroyed)

- "zpool scrub" still leads to immediate panic

- there does not seem to be any functional way to use snapshot data
  even though it worked for me to create a snaphot
  - snapdir can not be activated (zfs set complains about a needed upgrade)
  - one try to rollback deadlocked, another one finished "successfuly"
    but a rollback did not happen

- no support for special files
  (not important unless using as the fs under /dev)

- it can store and retrieve data (even though it deadlocked
  on a large copy possibly due to the limited RAM)

My regrettable conclusion is that ZFS as-is on NetBSD does not provide
any visible advantages compared to other file systems.

To be fair, presumably it does the checksum protection (which no other
fs provides on NetBSD) but the important virtues like scrub and snapshots
do not seem to have been made operational.

Can anybody on the list shed more light on the state of affairs
and on the prospect of improving the usability of ZFS?

Regards,
Rune