Now available for all supported operating systems

May 13, 2016 23:59 GMT  ·  By

The ZFS for Linux devs have released today, May 13, 2016, a new build of the official OpenZFS implementation for Linux kernel-based operating systems, version 0.6.5.7.

According to the GitHub changelog of the project, the biggest new feature of the ZFS for Linux 0.6.5.7 is support for the latest Linux kernel releases, namely the current stable and most advanced branch, Linux kernel 4.5, and the soon-to-be-released Linux 4.6 kernel (coming this Sunday, May 15).

Therefore, thanks to the Linux kernel 4.5 and Linux kernel 4.6 compatibility added in version 0.6.5.7, ZFS for Linux now officially supports kernels from the now-deprecated 2.6.32 series till the upcoming 4.6 branch. But ZFS for Linux 0.6.5.7 also adds various bug fixes and improvements.

Solaris Porting Layer (SPL) now supported on PowerPC

Among these, we can mention support for building the Solaris Porting Layer (SPL) component on PowerPC (PPC) architectures, improvements to user namespaces UID and GID mapping, a fix for the miswriting of the ZPL (ZFS POSIX Layer) of the default POSIX ACL (Access Control Lists).

Also new in ZFS for Linux 0.6.5.7 are updated ZFS utilities to work as expected with disk partitions that have just been created, support for the import functionality to use device names that are stored in the label, as well as the addition of 32-bit FS_IOC32_{GET|SET}FLAGS compat ioctls for the PPC (PowerPC) architecture.

Last but not least, ZFS for Linux now ensures that the /dev/disk/by-partlabel directory is correctly populated, addresses a possible deadlock in the zfs_secpolicy_write_perms ioctl function, and fixes an inverted logic on none elevator comparison. You can download the ZFS for Linux 0.6.5.7 sources right now.

In related news, ZFS for Linux has finally landed in Debian GNU/Linux, after many years of hard work. As such, the project is now officially supported on Arch Linux, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, OpenSuSE, and, of course, Debian operating systems.