| ZPOOL-FEATURES(7) | Miscellaneous Information Manual | ZPOOL-FEATURES(7) |
zpool-features —
description of ZFS pool features
ZFS pool on-disk format versions are specified via
“features” which replace the old on-disk format numbers (the
last supported on-disk format number is 28). To enable a feature on a pool
use the zpool upgrade, or
set the feature@feature-name
property to enabled. Please also see the
Compatibility feature
sets section for information on how sets of features may be enabled
together.
The pool format does not affect file system version compatibility or the ability to send file systems between pools.
Since most features can be enabled independently of each other, the on-disk format of the pool is specified by the set of all features marked as active on the pool. If the pool was created by another software version this set may include unsupported features.
Every feature has a GUID of the form com.example:feature-name. The reversed DNS name ensures that the feature's GUID is unique across all ZFS implementations. When unsupported features are encountered on a pool they will be identified by their GUIDs. Refer to the documentation for the ZFS implementation that created the pool for information about those features.
Each supported feature also has a short name. By convention a feature's short name is the portion of its GUID which follows the ‘:’ (i.e. com.example:feature-name would have the short name feature-name), however a feature's short name may differ across ZFS implementations if following the convention would result in name conflicts.
Features can be in one of three states:
The state of supported features is exposed through pool properties of the form feature@short-name.
Some features may make on-disk format changes that do not interfere with other software's ability to read from the pool. These features are referred to as “read-only compatible”. If all unsupported features on a pool are read-only compatible, the pool can be imported in read-only mode by setting the readonly property during import (see zpool-import(8) for details on importing pools).
For each unsupported feature enabled on an imported pool, a pool property named unsupported@feature-name will indicate why the import was allowed despite the unsupported feature. Possible values for this property are:
Some features depend on other features being enabled in order to function. Enabling a feature will automatically enable any features it depends on.
It is sometimes necessary for a pool to maintain compatibility with a specific on-disk format, by enabling and disabling particular features. The compatibility feature facilitates this by allowing feature sets to be read from text files. When set to off (the default), compatibility feature sets are disabled (i.e. all features are enabled); when set to legacy, no features are enabled. When set to a comma-separated list of filenames (each filename may either be an absolute path, or relative to /etc/zfs/compatibility.d or /usr/share/zfs/compatibility.d), the lists of requested features are read from those files, separated by whitespace and/or commas. Only features present in all files are enabled.
Simple sanity checks are applied to the files: they must be between 1 B and 16 KiB in size, and must end with a newline character.
The requested features are applied when a pool is created using
zpool create
-o
compatibility=… and controls
which features are enabled when using zpool
upgrade. zpool
status will not show a warning about disabled
features which are not part of the requested feature set.
The special value legacy prevents any features
from being enabled, either via zpool
upgrade or zpool
set
feature@feature-name=enabled.
This setting also prevents pools from being upgraded to newer on-disk
versions. This is a safety measure to prevent new features from being
accidentally enabled, breaking compatibility.
By convention, compatibility files in /usr/share/zfs/compatibility.d are provided by the distribution, and include feature sets supported by important versions of popular distributions, and feature sets commonly supported at the start of each year. Compatibility files in /etc/zfs/compatibility.d, if present, will take precedence over files with the same name in /usr/share/zfs/compatibility.d.
If an unrecognized feature is found in these files, an error message will be shown. If the unrecognized feature is in a file in /etc/zfs/compatibility.d, this is treated as an error and processing will stop. If the unrecognized feature is under /usr/share/zfs/compatibility.d, this is treated as a warning and processing will continue. This difference is to allow distributions to include features which might not be recognized by the currently-installed binaries.
Compatibility files may include comments: any text from ‘#’ to the end of the line is ignored.
example#cat/usr/share/zfs/compatibility.d/grub2 # Features which are supported by GRUB2 allocation_classes async_destroy block_cloning bookmarks device_rebuild embedded_data empty_bpobj enabled_txg extensible_dataset filesystem_limits hole_birth large_blocks livelist log_spacemap lz4_compress project_quota resilver_defer spacemap_histogram spacemap_v2 userobj_accounting zilsaxattr zpool_checkpoint example#zpoolcreate-ocompatibility=grub2 bootpool vdev
See zpool-create(8) and zpool-upgrade(8) for more information on how these commands are affected by feature sets.
The following features are supported on this system:
This feature enables support for separate allocation classes.
This feature becomes active when a dedicated
allocation class vdev (dedup or special) is created with the
zpool create
or zpool
add commands. With
device removal, it can be returned to the enabled
state if all the dedicated allocation class vdevs are removed.
Destroying a file system requires traversing all of its data in order to return its used space to the pool. Without async_destroy, the file system is not fully removed until all space has been reclaimed. If the destroy operation is interrupted by a reboot or power outage, the next attempt to open the pool will need to complete the destroy operation synchronously.
When async_destroy is enabled, the file system's data will be reclaimed by a background process, allowing the destroy operation to complete without traversing the entire file system. The background process is able to resume interrupted destroys after the pool has been opened, eliminating the need to finish interrupted destroys as part of the open operation. The amount of space remaining to be reclaimed by the background process is available through the freeing property.
This feature is only active while freeing is non-zero.
This feature enables the use of the BLAKE3 hash algorithm for checksum and dedup. BLAKE3 is a secure hash algorithm focused on high performance.
When the blake3 feature is set to
enabled, the administrator can turn on the
blake3 checksum on any dataset using
zfs set
checksum=blake3
dset (see
zfs-set(8)). This feature becomes
active once a checksum property has
been set to blake3, and will return to being
enabled once all filesystems that have ever had their
checksum set to blake3 are destroyed.
When this feature is enabled ZFS will use
block cloning for operations like
copy_file_range(2).
Block cloning allows to create multiple references to a single block. It
is much faster than copying the data (as the actual data is neither read
nor written) and takes no additional space. Blocks can be cloned across
datasets under some conditions (like equal
recordsize, the same master encryption key,
etc.). ZFS tries its best to clone across datasets including encrypted
ones. This is limited for various (nontrivial) reasons depending on the
OS and/or ZFS internals.
This feature becomes active when first block is cloned. When the last cloned block is freed, it goes back to the enabled state.
This feature enables use of the zfs
bookmark command.
This feature is active while
any bookmarks exist in the pool. All bookmarks in the pool can be listed
by running zfs list
-t
bookmark
-r poolname.
This feature enables the creation and management of larger bookmarks which are needed for other features in ZFS.
This feature becomes active when a v2 bookmark is created and will be returned to the enabled state when all v2 bookmarks are destroyed.
This feature enables additional bookmark accounting fields, enabling the written#bookmark property (space written since a bookmark) and estimates of send stream sizes for incrementals from bookmarks.
This feature becomes active when a bookmark is created and will be returned to the enabled state when all bookmarks with these fields are destroyed.
This feature enables the ability for the
zpool attach and
zpool replace commands
to perform sequential reconstruction (instead of healing reconstruction)
when resilvering.
Sequential reconstruction resilvers a device in LBA order without immediately verifying the checksums. Once complete, a scrub is started, which then verifies the checksums. This approach allows full redundancy to be restored to the pool in the minimum amount of time. This two-phase approach will take longer than a healing resilver when the time to verify the checksums is included. However, unless there is additional pool damage, no checksum errors should be reported by the scrub. This feature is incompatible with raidz configurations. This feature becomes active while a sequential resilver is in progress, and returns to enabled when the resilver completes.
This feature enables the zpool
remove command to remove top-level vdevs,
evacuating them to reduce the total size of the pool.
This feature becomes active when the
zpool remove command is
used on a top-level vdev, and will never return to being
enabled.
This feature enables use of the draid vdev type. dRAID is a variant of RAID-Z which provides integrated distributed hot spares that allow faster resilvering while retaining the benefits of RAID-Z. Data, parity, and spare space are organized in redundancy groups and distributed evenly over all of the devices.
This feature becomes active when creating a pool which uses the draid vdev type, or when adding a new draid vdev to an existing pool.
This feature enables the use of the Edon-R hash
algorithm for checksum, including for nopwrite (if compression is also
enabled, an overwrite of a block whose checksum matches the data being
written will be ignored). In an abundance of caution, Edon-R requires
verification when used with dedup: zfs
set
dedup=edonr,verify
(see zfs-set(8)).
Edon-R is a very high-performance hash algorithm that was part of the NIST SHA-3 competition. It provides extremely high hash performance (over 350% faster than SHA-256), but was not selected because of its unsuitability as a general purpose secure hash algorithm. This implementation utilizes the new salted checksumming functionality in ZFS, which means that the checksum is pre-seeded with a secret 256-bit random key (stored on the pool) before being fed the data block to be checksummed. Thus the produced checksums are unique to a given pool, preventing hash collision attacks on systems with dedup.
When the edonr feature is set to
enabled, the administrator can turn on the
edonr checksum on any dataset using
zfs set
checksum=edonr
dset (see
zfs-set(8)). This feature becomes
active once a checksum property has
been set to edonr, and will return to being
enabled once all filesystems that have ever had their
checksum set to edonr are destroyed.
This feature improves the performance and compression ratio of highly-compressible blocks. Blocks whose contents can compress to 112 bytes or smaller can take advantage of this feature.
When this feature is enabled, the contents of highly-compressible blocks are stored in the block “pointer” itself (a misnomer in this case, as it contains the compressed data, rather than a pointer to its location on disk). Thus the space of the block (one sector, typically 512 B or 4 KiB) is saved, and no additional I/O is needed to read and write the data block. This feature becomes active as soon as it is enabled and will never return to being enabled.
This feature increases the performance of creating and using a large number of snapshots of a single filesystem or volume, and also reduces the disk space required.
When there are many snapshots, each snapshot uses many Block Pointer Objects (bpobjs) to track blocks associated with that snapshot. However, in common use cases, most of these bpobjs are empty. This feature allows us to create each bpobj on-demand, thus eliminating the empty bpobjs.
This feature is active while there are any filesystems, volumes, or snapshots which were created after enabling this feature.
Once this feature is enabled, ZFS records the transaction group number in which new features are enabled. This has no user-visible impact, but other features may depend on this feature.
This feature becomes active as soon as it is enabled and will never return to being enabled.
This feature enables the creation and management of natively encrypted datasets.
This feature becomes active when an encrypted dataset is created and will be returned to the enabled state when all datasets that use this feature are destroyed.
This feature allows more flexible use of internal ZFS data structures, and exists for other features to depend on.
This feature will be active when the first dependent feature uses it, and will be returned to the enabled state when all datasets that use this feature are destroyed.
This feature enables filesystem and snapshot limits. These limits can be used to control how many filesystems and/or snapshots can be created at the point in the tree on which the limits are set.
This feature is active once either of the limit properties has been set on a dataset and will never return to being enabled.
This feature enables the upgraded version of errlog, which
required an on-disk error log format change. Now the error log of each
head dataset is stored separately in the zap object and keyed by the
head id. With this feature enabled, every dataset affected by an error
block is listed in the output of zpool
status. In case of encrypted filesystems with
unloaded keys we are unable to check their snapshots or clones for
errors and these will not be reported. An "access denied"
error will be reported.
This feature becomes active as soon as it is enabled and will never return to being enabled.
This feature has/had bugs,
the result of which is that, if you do a zfs
send -i (or
-R, since it uses
-i) from an affected dataset, the receiving
party will not see any checksum or other errors, but the resulting
destination snapshot will not match the source. Its use by
zfs send
-i has been disabled by default (see
send_holes_without_birth_time
in zfs(4)).
This feature improves performance of incremental sends
(zfs send
-i) and receives for objects with many holes.
The most common case of hole-filled objects is zvols.
An incremental send stream from snapshot A to snapshot B contains information about every block that changed between A and B. Blocks which did not change between those snapshots can be identified and omitted from the stream using a piece of metadata called the “block birth time”, but birth times are not recorded for holes (blocks filled only with zeroes). Since holes created after A cannot be distinguished from holes created before A, information about every hole in the entire filesystem or zvol is included in the send stream.
For workloads where holes are rare this is not a problem. However, when incrementally replicating filesystems or zvols with many holes (for example a zvol formatted with another filesystem) a lot of time will be spent sending and receiving unnecessary information about holes that already exist on the receiving side.
Once the hole_birth feature has been enabled the block birth times of all new holes will be recorded. Incremental sends between snapshots created after this feature is enabled will use this new metadata to avoid sending information about holes that already exist on the receiving side.
This feature becomes active as soon as it is enabled and will never return to being enabled.
This feature allows the record size on a dataset to be set larger than 128 KiB.
This feature becomes active once a dataset contains a file with a block size larger than 128 KiB, and will return to being enabled once all filesystems that have ever had their recordsize larger than 128 KiB are destroyed.
This feature allows the size of dnodes in a dataset to be set larger than 512 B. This feature becomes active once a dataset contains an object with a dnode larger than 512 B, which occurs as a result of setting the dnodesize dataset property to a value other than legacy. The feature will return to being enabled once all filesystems that have ever contained a dnode larger than 512 B are destroyed. Large dnodes allow more data to be stored in the bonus buffer, thus potentially improving performance by avoiding the use of spill blocks.
This feature allows clones to be deleted faster than the traditional method when a large number of random/sparse writes have been made to the clone. All blocks allocated and freed after a clone is created are tracked by the the clone's livelist which is referenced during the deletion of the clone. The feature is activated when a clone is created and remains active until all clones have been destroyed.
This feature improves performance for heavily-fragmented pools, especially when workloads are heavy in random-writes. It does so by logging all the metaslab changes on a single spacemap every TXG instead of scattering multiple writes to all the metaslab spacemaps.
This feature becomes active as soon as it is enabled and will never return to being enabled.
lz4 is a high-performance real-time compression algorithm that features significantly faster compression and decompression as well as a higher compression ratio than the older lzjb compression. Typically, lz4 compression is approximately 50% faster on compressible data and 200% faster on incompressible data than lzjb. It is also approximately 80% faster on decompression, while giving approximately a 10% better compression ratio.
When the lz4_compress feature is set to enabled, the administrator can turn on lz4 compression on any dataset on the pool using the zfs-set(8) command. All newly written metadata will be compressed with the lz4 algorithm.
This feature becomes active as soon as it is enabled and will never return to being enabled.
This feature allows a dump device to be configured with a pool comprised of multiple vdevs. Those vdevs may be arranged in any mirrored or raidz configuration.
When the multi_vdev_crash_dump feature is set to enabled, the administrator can use dumpadm(8) to configure a dump device on a pool comprised of multiple vdevs.
Under FreeBSD and Linux this feature is unused, but registered for compatibility. New pools created on these systems will have the feature enabled but will never transition to active, as this functionality is not required for crash dump support. Existing pools where this feature is active can be imported.
This feature is an enhancement of device_removal, which will over time reduce the memory used to track removed devices. When indirect blocks are freed or remapped, we note that their part of the indirect mapping is “obsolete” – no longer needed.
This feature becomes active when the
zpool remove command is
used on a top-level vdev, and will never return to being
enabled.
This feature allows administrators to account the spaces and objects usage information against the project identifier (ID).
The project ID is an object-based attribute. When
upgrading an existing filesystem, objects without a project ID will be
assigned a zero project ID. When this feature is enabled, newly created
objects inherit their parent directories' project ID if the parent's
inherit flag is set (via chattr
[+-]P
or zfs
project
-s|-C). Otherwise, the
new object's project ID will be zero. An object's project ID can be
changed at any time by the owner (or privileged user) via
chattr -p
prjid or zfs
project -p
prjid.
This feature will become active as soon as
it is enabled and will never return to being disabled.
Each filesystem will be upgraded automatically when
remounted, or when a new file is created under that filesystem. The
upgrade can also be triggered on filesystems via
zfs set
version=current
fs. The upgrade process runs in
the background and may take a while to complete for filesystems
containing large amounts of files.
This feature enables the use of redacted
zfs sends, which create
redaction bookmarks storing the list of blocks redacted by the send that
created them. For more information about redacted sends, see
zfs-send(8).
This feature enables the receiving of redacted
zfs send streams, which
create redacted datasets when received. These datasets are missing some
of their blocks, and so cannot be safely mounted, and their contents
cannot be safely read. For more information about redacted receives, see
zfs-send(8).
This feature allows ZFS to postpone new resilvers if an existing one is already in progress. Without this feature, any new resilvers will cause the currently running one to be immediately restarted from the beginning.
This feature becomes active once a resilver has been deferred, and returns to being enabled when the deferred resilver begins.
This feature enables the use of the SHA-512/256 truncated hash algorithm (FIPS 180-4) for checksum and dedup. The native 64-bit arithmetic of SHA-512 provides an approximate 50% performance boost over SHA-256 on 64-bit hardware and is thus a good minimum-change replacement candidate for systems where hash performance is important, but these systems cannot for whatever reason utilize the faster skein and edonr algorithms.
When the sha512 feature is set to
enabled, the administrator can turn on the
sha512 checksum on any dataset using
zfs set
checksum=sha512
dset (see
zfs-set(8)). This feature becomes
active once a checksum property has
been set to sha512, and will return to being
enabled once all filesystems that have ever had their
checksum set to sha512 are destroyed.
This feature enables the use of the Skein hash algorithm for checksum and dedup. Skein is a high-performance secure hash algorithm that was a finalist in the NIST SHA-3 competition. It provides a very high security margin and high performance on 64-bit hardware (80% faster than SHA-256). This implementation also utilizes the new salted checksumming functionality in ZFS, which means that the checksum is pre-seeded with a secret 256-bit random key (stored on the pool) before being fed the data block to be checksummed. Thus the produced checksums are unique to a given pool, preventing hash collision attacks on systems with dedup.
When the skein feature is set to
enabled, the administrator can turn on the
skein checksum on any dataset using
zfs set
checksum=skein
dset (see
zfs-set(8)). This feature becomes
active once a checksum property has
been set to skein, and will return to being
enabled once all filesystems that have ever had their
checksum set to skein are destroyed.
This features allows ZFS to maintain more information about how free space is organized within the pool. If this feature is enabled, it will be activated when a new space map object is created, or an existing space map is upgraded to the new format, and never returns back to being enabled.
This feature enables the use of the new space map encoding which consists of two words (instead of one) whenever it is advantageous. The new encoding allows space maps to represent large regions of space more efficiently on-disk while also increasing their maximum addressable offset.
This feature becomes active once it is enabled, and never returns back to being enabled.
This feature allows administrators to account the object usage information by user and group.
This feature becomes
active as soon as it is enabled and
will never return to being enabled.
Each filesystem will be upgraded automatically when
remounted, or when a new file is created under that filesystem. The
upgrade can also be triggered on filesystems via
zfs set
version=current
fs. The upgrade process runs in
the background and may take a while to complete for filesystems
containing large amounts of files.
This feature creates a ZAP object for the root vdev.
This feature becomes active after the next
zpool import or
zpool reguid. Properties can be retrieved or set
on the root vdev using zpool
get and zpool
set with
root as the vdev
name which is an alias for
root-0.
This feature enables xattr=sa extended attribute logging in the ZIL. If enabled, extended attribute changes (both xattrdir=dir and xattr=sa) are guaranteed to be durable if either the dataset had sync=always set at the time the changes were made, or sync(2) is called on the dataset after the changes were made.
This feature becomes active when a ZIL is created for at least one dataset and will be returned to the enabled state when it is destroyed for all datasets that use this feature.
This feature enables the zpool
checkpoint command that can checkpoint the state
of the pool at the time it was issued and later rewind back to it or
discard it.
This feature becomes active when the
zpool checkpoint command
is used to checkpoint the pool. The feature will only return back to
being enabled when the pool is rewound or the
checkpoint has been discarded.
zstd is a high-performance compression algorithm that features a combination of high compression ratios and high speed. Compared to gzip, zstd offers slightly better compression at much higher speeds. Compared to lz4, zstd offers much better compression while being only modestly slower. Typically, zstd compression speed ranges from 250 to 500 MB/s per thread and decompression speed is over 1 GB/s per thread.
When the zstd feature is set to
enabled, the administrator can turn on
zstd compression of any dataset using
zfs set
compress=zstd
dset (see
zfs-set(8)). This feature becomes
active once a compress property has
been set to zstd, and will return to being
enabled once all filesystems that have ever had their
compress property set to zstd are
destroyed.
| June 23, 2022 | OpenZFS |