FreeBSD and ZFS

ZFS has been making headlines lately, so it seems like the right time to talk about the longstanding relationship between FreeBSD and ZFS.

For nearly seven years, FreeBSD has included a production quality ZFS implementation, making it one of the key features of the FreeBSD operating system. ZFS is a combined file system and volume manager. Decoupling physical media from logical volumes allows free space to be efficiently shared between all of the file systems. ZFS introduced unprecedented data integrity and reliability guarantees to storage on FreeBSD. ZFS supports varying levels of redundancy for tolerance of hardware failures and includes cryptographic checksums on all data to guard against corruption.

Allan Jude, VP of Operations at ScaleEngine and coauthor of FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS, said “We started using ZFS in 2011 because we needed to safely store a huge quantity of video for our customers. FreeBSD was, and still is, the best platform for deploying ZFS in production. We now store more than a petabyte of video using ZFS, and use ZFS Boot Environments on all of our servers.”

So why does FreeBSD include ZFS and contribute to its continued development? FreeBSD community members understand the need for continued development work as technologies evolve. OpenZFS is the truly open source successor to the ZFS project and the FreeBSD Project has participated in OpenZFS since its founding in 2013. FreeBSD developers and those from Delphix, Nexenta, Joyent, the ZFS on Linux project, and the Illumos project work together to continue improving OpenZFS.

FreeBSD’s unique open source infrastructure, copyfree license, and engaged community support the integration of a variety of free software components, including OpenZFS. FreeBSD makes an excellent operating system for servers and end users, and it provides a foundation for many open source projects and commercial products.

We’re happy that ZFS is available in FreeBSD as a fully integrated, first class file system and wish to thank all of those who have contributed to it over the years.