Red Hat engineers have released Stratis 3.6, an incremental update to their Linux storage solution. Stratis, which utilizes the Rust programming language and is built on the XFS file-system and LVM, aims to provide functionality similar to ZFS and Btrfs. However, its adoption in the wild remains limited.

Stratis 3.6 introduces several new features and improvements. Users can now set size limits on file-systems, ensuring better control over storage usage. The release also includes a persistent keyring for Clevis, which enhances security. D-Bus handling has been improved, allowing for better communication when a device grows or a pool is extended. Additionally, the update includes various maintenance tasks and code cleaning.

For those interested in trying out Stratis 3.6, the daemon release can be downloaded from the official Stratis-Storage GitHub page.

Overall, the latest release of Stratis continues to enhance Linux storage management. While still gaining traction, Stratis provides becoming a viable option for those in need of modern storage management in their Linux environments.

For more details on Stratis 3.6, please visit the Stratis-Storage GitHub page.

Source: Phoronix.

TrueNAS, a leading provider of storage systems, uses OpenZFS as the foundation for its data management layer. As the deployment vehicle for the majority of OpenZFS storage systems used today, TrueNAS is excited about the continuous improvement of OpenZFS.

The 11th annual OpenZFS Developer Summit for 2023 kicked off on October 16th in San Francisco. Among the many exciting projects being developed, two projects stand out with significant contributions and investments from iXsystems.

One of the primary issues with traditional deduplication (dedup) with ZFS has been the need to keep the dedup tables in memory at all times, which led to performance penalties and usability issues. However, with the introduction of Fast Dedup, the metadata size is now constrained to fit in either RAM or flash, eliminating the performance penalty. The metadata structure for Fast Dedup has been completely re-engineered to allow efficient updates and the ability to evict non-deduplicated blocks. These improvements, combined with properly configured storage, will result in a significant improvement in dedup performance for larger systems. Allan Jude, a major sponsor of the Fast Dedup project, will be presenting the details at the summit.

RAIDZ expansion is another exciting project that is entering its final quality assurance cycle. This feature allows a small pool with as few as two drives to be gradually expanded with one drive at a time, preserving existing data with its original parity. The administrative process for small systems has also been simplified. Don Brady and Matt Ahrens will be presenting the latest updates on RAIDZ expansion at the summit. This project has taken a few years but is now in its final stretch and will be included in OpenZFS 2.3.

The current release, OpenZFS 2.2, has been integrated into TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 (Cobia). The release candidate version of Cobia, which includes dRAID, has been successfully provided to the community with over 3,000 testers. The formal release of TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 is planned in the coming weeks. In early 2024, TrueNAS CORE 13.1 will be released with OpenZFS 2.2, and TrueNAS Enterprise appliances will also use OpenZFS 2.2 in their respective software versions.

OpenZFS 2.3 (or potentially 3.0) is expected to take most of the next 12 months to mature and reach release quality and status. The RAIDZ expansion and Fast Dedup features will be integrated with TrueNAS at that time. Early availability of Nightlies and BETA software is expected in mid-2024 for TrueNAS SCALE.

Source: TrueNAS.

Longhorn, a distributed block storage system for Kubernetes, has released its latest release candidate, Longhorn v1.4.4-rc1. This cloud-native storage solution is built using Kubernetes and container primitives.

Longhorn is known for being lightweight, reliable, and powerful. It can be easily installed on an existing Kubernetes cluster with a single kubectl apply command or by using Helm charts. Once installed, Longhorn adds support for persistent volumes to the Kubernetes cluster.

One of the key features of Longhorn is its implementation of distributed block storage using containers and microservices. It creates a dedicated storage controller for each block device volume and synchronously replicates the volume across multiple replicas stored on multiple nodes. The orchestration of these storage controllers and replicas is done using Kubernetes.

The v1.4.4-rc1 release of Longhorn introduces bug fixes and improvements, primarily focused on stability. Users are encouraged to try out the release and provide feedback. The Longhorn project appreciates all contributions.

For installation, Longhorn supports three methods: Rancher App Marketplace, Kubectl, and Helm. Detailed installation instructions can be found here.

Before upgrading to Longhorn v1.4.4 from v1.3.x/v1.4.x, it is important to read the important notes and ensure that the Kubernetes cluster is at least v1.21. The live upgrade from these source versions is not supported until the GA release. Upgrade instructions can be found here.

There are no deprecations or incompatibilities to note in this release. However, users are advised to check for any outstanding issues after the release on the Longhorn GitHub page here.

The v1.4.4-rc1 release also includes several enhancements, improvements, bug fixes, and stability and resilience updates. Notable improvements include the addition of disk status Prometheus metrics, removal of Longhorn engine path mismatch logs, and prevention of accidental deletion of Longhorn settings. A full list of these enhancements, improvements, and bug fixes can be found in the release notes.

The contributors to this release include @ChanYiLin, @PhanLe1010, @c3y1huang, and many others.

Longhorn continues to be a leading storage solution for Kubernetes, providing users with a reliable and powerful distributed block storage system. The release of Longhorn v1.4.4-rc1 brings important bug fixes and improvements, enhancing the stability of the platform. Users are encouraged to try out the release and provide feedback to further improve the Longhorn project.

OpenZFS has announced the release of version 2.2.0, an open-source implementation of the ZFS file system and volume manager. This release comes with several new features and performance improvements.

One notable new feature is block cloning, which allows for the creation of shallow copies of files or parts of files. This facility is used to implement “reflinks” or “file-level copy-on-write”. Additionally, Linux container support has been added, including support for Linux-specific container interfaces such as renameat(2), overlayfs, idmapped mounts in a user namespace, and namespace delegation support for containers.

Another important addition is the scrub error log, which allows zpool status to report all affected filesystems, snapshots, and clones when a shared corrupt block is found. The zpool scrub -e command can be used to perform a fast, targeted repair of known damaged blocks.

In terms of performance, this release introduces fully adaptive ARC, which allows the ARC to better adjust to highly dynamic workloads and minimizes the need for manual workload-dependent tuning. It also includes optimized SHA2 and Edon-R checksum implementations, as well as improvements in prefetching and general optimization.

For those interested in the technical details, the complete change log and module options are available in the OpenZFS documentation.

Overall, the release of version zfs-2.2.0 brings exciting new features and performance improvements to the OpenZFS/ZFS on Linux community. It is recommended for users who are looking to enhance their server, Linux, DevOps, and home lab environments.

For more information, please refer to the OpenZFS documentation for Linux and FreeBSD, and the complete change log.

OpenZFS has launched release candidate 5 (rc5) of version v2.2.0.

The release includes several changes and updates, including improvements to ZIL (ZFS Intent Log), rpm fixes, enhancements to zfsconcepts, and updates to ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache) headers. Additionally, there are compatibility updates for Linux and FreeBSD platforms.

Here are the supported platforms for this release:

• Linux: compatible with 3.10 - 6.5 kernels
• FreeBSD: compatible with releases starting from 12.2-RELEASE

The release candidate includes numerous bug fixes and enhancements to improve stability and performance. It is recommended for users who are interested in testing the latest features and providing feedback to the OpenZFS community.

To learn more and download the release candidate, visit the official OpenZFS GitHub page at https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases/tag/zfs-2.2.0-rc5.

TrueNAS SCALE is introducing a new and improved WebUI in the upcoming Cobia (23.10) release. The first Release Candidate for Cobia was launched on September 19th, and it currently has over 2,000 systems running on it. The official release of 23.10 is scheduled for October. The Cobia release includes significant technical advancements such as the new dRAID “Distributed RAID” pool type, an improved Apps UI, and an integrated bug-reporting process.

The new Cobia WebUI has been rearchitected from the CORE WebUI to provide a simpler interface. It is designed to present only the necessary information on each page, with advanced features hidden by default and additional forms appearing as needed. Initial reviews of this modernized and streamlined UI have been positive.

Major improvements have been made to the WebUI in Cobia, including:

• Improved Apps Screens
• Reimagined ZFS Storage Dashboard
• New and Improved Pool Creation Wizard
• Built-in Feedback and Bug Reporting

The Apps Screens in TrueNAS SCALE have been significantly enhanced. Each App is now effectively a Kubernetes Helm Chart that points to container images and provides configuration information for integrating multiple containers into an application. The new Apps screens offer better-structured access to all Apps based on category, and the new Discovery screens assist with App discovery. The Information screen provides details about each App and its sources, and bulk operations for updating Apps are available.

The ZFS Storage Dashboard in Cobia has also been reimagined to handle larger systems with more than a thousand drives. A new Pool Creation Wizard simplifies the process of creating pools based on available resources, automatically selecting drives for vdevs (drive groups) based on their size. The updated Storage Dashboard provides a simple dashboard to display the status of each pool and allows for the creation of new pools or expansion of existing ones using unassigned disks.

A new Feedback and Bug Reporting system has been introduced with TrueNAS SCALE Cobia RC.1. Users can provide feedback on the design of the page, add important details for their use case, and optionally capture a screenshot of the current page. Bug reports can also be submitted, including a brief summary of the issue and the option to attach debug files. Users will receive a TrueNAS ticket link to monitor the status and resolution of their bug.

While TrueNAS encourages users to try out the early releases of TrueNAS SCALE Cobia and provide feedback, it is recommended to use TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.3.3 for cases where reliability and primary data retention are required. TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.4, which is planned for release in early October, will be the last major update for the 22.12 release branch. TrueNAS SCALE Cobia will gradually become the recommended version in Q4 2023 and beyond.

Users have the option to automatically migrate storage services and VMs from CORE to SCALE, and TrueNAS provides the ability to replace TrueNAS CORE Plugins and jails with Apps. For further advice or answers to questions, users can visit the TrueNAS Community Forums or Discord Channel.

Source: TrueNAS.