The future of ZFS in FreeBSD, we pick highlights from the FreeBSD quarterly status report, flying with the raven, modern KDE on FreeBSD, many ways to launch FreeBSD in EC2, GOG installers on NetBSD, and more.
Headlines
The future of ZFS in FreeBSD
The sources for FreeBSD’s ZFS support are currently taken directly from Illumos with local ifdefs to support the peculiarities of FreeBSD where the Solaris Portability Layer (SPL) shims fall short. FreeBSD has regularly pulled changes from Illumos and tried to push back any bug fixes and new features done in the context of FreeBSD. In the past few years the vast majority of new development in ZFS has taken place in DelphixOS and zfsonlinux (ZoL). Earlier this year Delphix announced that they will be moving to ZoL: https://www.delphix.com/blog/kickoff-future-eko-2018 This shift means that there will be little to no net new development of Illumos. While working through the git history of ZoL I have also discovered that many races and locking bugs have been fixed in ZoL and never made it back to Illumos and thus FreeBSD. This state of affairs has led to a general agreement among the stakeholders that I have spoken to that it makes sense to rebase FreeBSD’s ZFS on ZoL. Brian Behlendorf has graciously encouraged me to add FreeBSD support directly to ZoL https://github.com/zfsonfreebsd/ZoF so that we might all have a single shared code base.
A port for ZoF can be found at https://github.com/miwi-fbsd/zof-port Before it can be committed some additional functionality needs to be added to the FreeBSD opencrypto framework. These can be found at https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18520
This port will provide FreeBSD users with multi modifier protection, project quotas, encrypted datasets, allocation classes, vectorized raidz, vectorized checksums, and various command line improvements.


FreeBSD Quarterly Status Update
With FreeBSD having gone all the way to 12, it is perhaps useful to take a look back at all the things that have been accomplished, in terms of many visible changes, as well as all the things that happen behind the scenes to ensure that FreeBSD continues to offer an alternative in both design, implementation, and execution.
The things you can look forward to reading about are too numerous to summarize, but cover just about everything from finalizing releases, administrative work, optimizations and depessimizations, features added and fixed, and many areas of improvement that might just surprise you a little.
Please have a cup of coffee, tea, hot cocoa, or other beverage of choice, and enjoy this culmulative set of reports covering everything that’s been done since October, 2017.
—Daniel Ebdrup


News Roundup
One year of flying with the Raven: Ready for the Desktop?
It has been a little over one year now that I’m with the Ravenports project. Time to reflect my involvement, my expectations and hopes.

Ravenports

Ravenports is a universal packaging framework for *nix operating systems. For the user it provides easy access to binary packages of common software for multiple platforms. It has been the long-lasting champion on Repology’s top 10 repositories regarding package freshness (rarely dropping below 96 percent while all other projects keep below 90!).
For the porter it offers a well-designed and elegant means of writing cross-platform buildsheets that allow building the same version of the software with (completely or mostly) the same compile-time configuration on different operating systems or distributions.
And for the developer it means a real-world project that’s written in modern Ada (ravenadm) and C (pkg) – as well as some Perl for support scripts and make. Things feel very optimized and fast. Not being a programmer though, I cannot really say anything about the actual code and thus leave it to the interested reader’s judgement.


Modern KDE on FreeBSD
New stuff in the official FreeBSD repositories! The X11 team has landed a newer version of libinput, opening up the way for KDE