Digging into the new features in OpenZFS post-Linux migration

Enlarge / There have been some big developments for ZFS in the past several weeks. (credit: Aurich Lawson)
ZFS on Linux 0.8 (ZoL) brought tons of new features and performance improvements when it was released on May 23. They came after Delphix announced that it was migrating its own product to Linux back in March 2018. We'll go over some of the most exciting May features (like ZFS native encryption) here today.
For the full list—including both new features and performance improvements not covered here—you can visit the ZoL 0.8.0 release on Github. (Note that ZoL 0.8.1 was released last week, but since ZFS on Linux follows semantic versioning, it's a bugfix release only.)
Unfortunately for Ubuntu fans, these new features won't show up in Canonical's repositories for quite some time—October 2019's forthcoming interim release, Eoan Ermine, is still showing 0.7.12 in its repos. We can hope that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (which has yet to be named) will incorporate the 0.8.x branch, but there's no official word so far; if you're running Ubuntu 18.04 (or later) and absolutely cannot wait, the widely-used Jonathon F PPA has 0.8.1 available. Debian has 0.8.0 in its experimental repo, Arch Linux has 0.8.1 in its zfs-dkms AUR package, and Gentoo has 0.8.1 in testing at sys-fs/zfs. Users of other Linux distributions can find instructions for building packages directly from master at https://zfsonlinux.org/.
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