[HN Gopher] Native ZFS VDEV for Object Storage (OpenZFS Summit)
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       Native ZFS VDEV for Object Storage (OpenZFS Summit)
        
       Author : suprasam
       Score  : 50 points
       Date   : 2026-01-14 18:49 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.zettalane.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.zettalane.com)
        
       | doktor2u wrote:
       | That's brilliant! Always amazed at how zfs keeps morphing and
       | stays relevant!
        
       | curt15 wrote:
       | How does this relate to the work presented a few years ago by the
       | ZFS devs using S3 as object storage?
       | https://youtu.be/opW9KhjOQ3Q?si=CgrYi0P4q9gz-2Mq
        
         | tw04 wrote:
         | AFAIK it was never released, and it used FUSE, it wasn't
         | native.
        
         | magicalhippo wrote:
         | Just going by the submitted article, it seems very similar in
         | what it achieves, but seems to be implemented slightly
         | differently. As I recall the DelphiX solution did not use a
         | character device to communicate with the user-space S3 service,
         | and it relied on a local NVMe backed write cache to make 16kB
         | blocks performant by coalescing them into large objects (10 MB
         | IIRC).
         | 
         | This solution instead seems to rely on using 1MB blocks and
         | store those directly as objects, alleviating the intermediate
         | caching and indirection layer. Larger number of objects but
         | less local overhead.
         | 
         | DelphiX's rationale for 16 kB blocks was that their primary
         | use-case was PostgreSQL database storage. I presume this is
         | geared for other workloads.
         | 
         | And, importantly since we're on HN, DelphiX's user-space
         | service was written in Rust as I recall it, this uses Go.
        
       | glemion43 wrote:
       | I do not get it.
       | 
       | Why would I use zfs for this? Isn't the power of zfs that it's a
       | filesystem with checksum and stuff like encryption?
       | 
       | Why would I use it for s3?
        
         | bakies wrote:
         | I've got a massive storage server built that I want to run s3
         | protocol on it. It's already running ZFS. This is exactly what
         | I want.
         | 
         | zfs-share already implements SMB and NFS.
        
         | mustache_kimono wrote:
         | > Why would I use it for s3?
         | 
         | You have it the wrong way around. Here, ZFS uses many small S3
         | objects as the storage substrate, rather than physical disks.
         | The value proposition is that this should be definitely cheaper
         | and perhaps more durable than EBS.
         | 
         | See s3backer, a FUSE implementation of similar:
         | https://github.com/archiecobbs/s3backer
         | 
         | See prior in kernel ZFS work by Delphix which AFAIK was closed
         | by Delphix management:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opW9KhjOQ3Q
         | 
         | BTW this appears to be closed too!
        
       | PunchyHamster wrote:
       | FS metrics without random IO benchmark are near meaningless,
       | sequential read is best case for basically every file system and
       | it's essentially "how fast you can get things from S3" in this
       | case
        
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       (page generated 2026-01-14 23:00 UTC)