OpenZFS 2.4 Squeezes in Some Last Minute Improvements

Following OpenZFS 2.4-rc3 from nearly one month ago is now a fourth release candidate for the upcoming OpenZFS 2.4. A few more features and improvements have been squeezed into this release in nearing the stable milestone.

There is now support for default user/group/project quotas including object quotas, support in the Direct IO mode to fallback to lightweight uncached IO when dealing with unaligned writes (wiring O_DIRECT also to Uncached I/O), unified allocation throttling as a new means to reduce vdev fragmentation, and better encryption performance when using AVX2 for AES-GCM. The AVX2 implementation of AES-GCM is being adopted from BoringSSL to help the performance on AMD Zen 3 and similar CPUs for up to an 80% speed-up reported.

OpenZFS 2.4-rc4 also now allows ZIL on special vdevs when available, new options, multiple gang blocks improvements, new dedup optimizations, and other fixes.

Downloads and more details on all of the interesting OpenZFS 2.4-rc4 improvements via OpenZFS on GitHub. Here's to hoping that OpenZFS 2.4 stable manages to make it out before the end of the calendar year.