ZFS on Windows Status

[nixcamic]

Hey I'm asking this here since ZFS on Windows doesn't have any sort of forum and some of the devs are the same for both projects (where do they find the time ) and I'm not sure where else to ask.

Anyhow, what is the status, more or less, of OpenZFS on Windows right now? Will it destroy my zpool and start my cpu on fire? Will it make Windows randomly bluescreen? Is it completely safe?

Thanks!

[lundman]

Ah yes, I was going to finish setting up the hosting for the Windows port too, I was hoping someone would volunteer

The Windows port is not ready for general use no, you will most likely BSOD, so if you care about your PCs uptime, don't run it. And you should know how to delete the ZFSin.sys file from Windows\System32\Drivers directory if it ends up in a boot loop.

But, if you have a Windows VM, or Windows hardware you really don't care about, or are a developer and can contribute crash stacks if it crashes, you could have fun trying it. You can do light work, read some files, write some - but you will probably encounter an issue at some point. Due to the way ZFS works, you should not be able to lose any ZFS data - but there are gaps in what gets written. There is no UID mapping yet, nor ACLs, xattrs. But just the pure data will be there. Alas, if you do have nasty crashes, it is anyone's guess as to what will happen to the NTFS volumes it runs on.

As for time - it does seem I don't have time to do all my projects (at the speed that I want them to progress) but hopefully other developers will come and go with time

[Wowfunhappy]

Is it possible to limit memory usage in the Windows port yet?

I think I might have a potential use case for the unfinished driver. My main partition is macOS, but I boot into Windows when I want to play graphics-intensive video games. I would very much like to have some access to my zfs pool from the Windows side, but for occasional / light use. I'm okay putting up with occasional blue screens, and I would only ever be reading files, never writing them...

[lundman]

Standard disclaimer goes here though, have backups and all that. One could argue with a readonly-import of the pool, maybe it would be safe - but I don't even know if I implemented readonly yet!

Yes, the Windows port has the same memory allocator, uses 40% of available memory, but you can set it with the kstat utility. https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/ZFS ... 662191ad82

There is a Windows installer for it - but let's make it clear, I'm not suggesting you should run Windows version yet

[Xochikubrick]

Hey!!Last post on this was 2 years ago, any news? I was playing around with it and was successful to a point, but now that I have a proper Zpool and file system, I cant seem to be able to just mount the filesystem without mounting the pool... so just wondering the over al status