OpenZFS continues to evolve as a robust filesystem for everything from IoT devices to supercomputing clusters. The upcoming OpenZFS 2.4 release (Nov 2025) focuses on stability, usability, and performance.

Key Features in 2.4

• Fast dedup log pacing
• Fix for Encryption + ZFS send
• Skip slow RAID-Z children
• Improved allocation under fragmentation
• Scrub only changed blocks in a date range
• Parallel ARC eviction for large-memory systems
• Asynchronous ARC flush on pool export
• New JSON output, zfs rewrite command, project quotas on FreeBSD, ZVOL threading, and more

In-Development Features

• Label Redesign: Larger (256 MiB) labels, more uberblocks, support for larger sector sizes, better rewind and diagnostics.
• AnyRaid-Z: Flexible RAID-Z with mixed disk sizes for higher usable capacity.
• Forced Export: Allows safe forced unmount of suspended pools to restore uptime.
• AWS Enhancements: Optimized write strategies for provisioned IOPS EBS volumes.

Potential Features

• BRT Log: Improves performance of block cloning/reflinks.
• SMR Drive Support: Optimizations to handle overlapping track designs.

Future Technologies

• NVMe-connected HDDs: Standardized interfaces for reconfigurable storage.
• CXL (Compute Express Link): Disaggregated computing and memory pooling to scale ZFS without distributed FS complexity.

https://klarasystems.com/articles/zfs-new-features-roadmap-innovations/