Re: zfs questions

On Sat, Feb 21, 2026 at 9:34 AM Brad Spencer <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Greg Troxel <[email protected]> writes:
>
> > Takashi YAMAMOTO <[email protected]> writes:
> >
> >> * is anyone using zfs in netbsd seriously? :-)
> >
> > I am using it on my desktop, and a on a dom0 hosting pkg builders.
> >
> > It mostly works, except that one must be careful not to simultaneously
> >
> >   run low on memory
> >   run programs that dirty mmap'd pages (syncthing!)
> >
> > and probably also not
> >
> >   run really low on memory such that there is a lot of paging
> >
>
> This is a reaonsably summary of the quirks.

what's the symptom of the issues? do you have PRs?

>
> I use ZFS all of the time on two of my build systems, one for pkgsrc and
> one for the OS.  Back when I had a $DAYJOB, I used ZFS on Solaris and on
> Triton Data Center and find that most of the features I am familar with
> work on NetBSD.  Mostly just with the quirks mentioned above.
>
> >
> > As I undertand things, from chuq@ figuring out a deadlock after much
> > offlist discussion with Brad, there is a deadlock from trying to free
> > pages from the arc and trying to write dirty pages.  The fix is to have
> > two threads for this, instead of one doing both, or at least that's how
> > FreeBSD does it.
> >
> >> * does anyone have a plan to update the codebase to recent openzfs?
> >
> > No, but updating would be great.   However, my impression is that the
> > zfs world is getting messy and I am not sure that FreeBSD is really
> > based on openzfs as clearly as I think you might think.  Please just
> > take this as a caution that the situation seems more complicated the
> > last few years than it was maybe 5y ago.
>
> It would be awful nice if a newer code base could be introduced as I am
> sure that there are bugs present in the one NetBSD has and to sync with
> some of the newer features.  I used to think OpenZFS was the answer but
> after reading more on it, I am not so sure any more and it is not clear
> to me what a good upstream might be right now.
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> --
> Brad Spencer - [email protected]
>