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 rewritecommand, 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/
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