What is the zfs support policy wrt. LTS releases?

[Sam Van den Eynde]

If we consider the zfs 0.x releases as being major (0.6, 0.7, 0.8), is the assumption correct that LTS releases will not receive a new major ZFS release ?

To be as practical as possible: Bionic will be stuck at zfs 0.7.x, Xenial at zfs 0.6.x ?

If my assumption is wrong, when would Xenial see zfs 0.7 ?

Has a policy been defined ?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

I am not sure if this is might be more of a question rather than a bug report, but I'll try to answer.

At the moment the version of zfs-linux in Ubuntu bionic is 0.7.5-1ubuntu7. I don't know if there are any plans to update this particular package before release of 18.04, but at the moment this seems to be the version which will be shipped.

I just found bug 1757012, so it is possible this could be updated if there is a push for it.

In general, newer package versions are added to the development version of Ubuntu during the development cycle until it is officially released. So for instance 16.04 (xenial) is shipping what was the latest version in the archive at the time it was released. The package archives aren't completly frozen, it is possible to update packages with specific, important patches in a Stable Release Upgrade (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates) or a backport of a newer version (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBackports).

Hope this helps.

[Colin Ian King (colin-king)]

Adding to the above comment, it is our intention to keep ZFS refreshed with important bug fixes during the release lifetime. If bug fixes are overlooked please file a bug and we can backport these into ZFS supported in the release.

[Sam Van den Eynde (samvde)]

I think the answer does not cover my question, as the ZFS driver is linked to the kernel, which evolves with point releases and/or HWE kernels on LTS versions.

To make it as practical as possible, let's assume ZFS 0.8 gets released in June. I think I now can conclude it will not get backported to the 4.15 kernel shipped with Bionic.

Then the next question is: would it be included in 18.10? If that's the case, would it then come to the LTS through HWE or the point release as well?

[Colin Ian King (colin-king)]

Generally the latest ZFS found in Debian is sync'd into Ubuntu on each release, hence if ZFS 0.8 is available for 18.10 then it will land in that release.

Point releases don't pick up newer versions of ZFS, just the normal SRU bug fixes for that release.