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Comment by BodyCulture

4 days ago

How well tested is this in combination with encryption?

Is the ZFS team handling encryption as a first class priority at all?

ZFS on Linux inherited a lot of fame from ZFS on Solaris, but everyone using it in production should study the issue tracker very well for a realistic impression of the situation.

Main issue with encryption is occasional attempts by certain (specific) Linux kernel developer to lockout ZFS out of access to advanced instruction set extensions (far from the only weird idea of that specific developer).

The way ZFS encryption is layered, the features should be pretty much orthogonal from each other, but I'll admit that there's a bit of lacking with ZFS native encryption (though mainly in upper layer tooling in my experience rather than actual on-disk encryption parts)

  • These are actually wrappers around CPU instructions, so what ZFS does is implement its own equivalents. This does not affect encryption (beyond the inconvenience that we did not have SIMD acceleration for a while on certain architectures).

The new features should interact fine with encryption. They are implemented at different parts of ZFS' internal stack.

There have been many man hours put into investigating bug reports involving encryption and some fixes were made. Unfortunately, something appears to be going wrong when non-raw sends of encrypted datasets are received by another system:

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/12014

I do not believe anyone has figured out what is going wrong there. It has not been for lack of trying. Raw sends from encrypted datasets appear to be fine.