ZFS-FUSE 0.7.1 Released

The last official release of zfs-fuse was years ago, and it was seriously starting to fall behind other implementations. It was effectively abandoned, which is quite inconvenient considering it is still the only viable option on 32-bit Linux installations (e.g. on ARM or those who are still tied to i686 for legacy reasons).

Since I use Linux on ARM heavily, I have been working on changing this for the past few weeks. The last official release 0.7.0 was made by Seth Heeren a few years ago, and this supported ZFS pool versions up to v23. Emmanuel Anne was maintaining an unofficial post-0.7.0 branch that had support for pool versions up to v26 added. Over the past couple of years, other people have contributed a few patches here and there (manual ashift setting at boot time, some patches to add support for ARM, a couple of patches maintained out of tree shipped with the Fedora package). Over the past few weeks I need a few additional features that have existed in other implementations, particularly for running a root file system on it (mount.zfs for legacy mount points, and better systemd/initramfs), so I added those features. It also transpired that a few of the patches that made it into the official 0.7.0 release weren’t in Emmanuel’s code tree since it was forked before the official 0.7.0 release. I located and backported those from Seth’s maint branch on github.

With all this done, and with no other volunteers showing any interest in further maintaining zfs-fuse, it seems to have fallen to me to make the decision to take the 0.7.1 release. I have tested this extensively on my ARM systems with pools of various sizes (16GB to 16TB) and complexities (single disk to RAIDZ2) and it has been very stable.

If you are stuck on a 32-bit Linux platform and would love the features of ZFS, you can find the latest release of zfs-fuse on on github:

https://github.com/gordan-bobic/zfs-fuse

Future work will include adding support for additional pool versions. I have already created branches for those, but, this will need extensive testing before I deem it stable enough for a release. If you are interested in helping with either development or testing of zfs-fuse, please, do get in touch.