Longterm zfs support for RHEL 9 and clones

[deajan]

So I run a couple of Almalinux 9 servers and am stuck as all RHEL9 clone users with OpenZFS 2.1.x branch.
This makes sense for long term support, but it seems that some bugs like #16019 and #15772 weren't backported to 2.1.x branch (the only ones I am aware of, sorry if not relevant perhaps).

Since RHEL 9 support is going until 2035, and since developpment of OpenZFS 2.1.x branch isn't probably going until that date, would it make sense rebase RHEL 9 OpenZFS version to the current "legacy" branch when new branches come out ? (Eg rebase to 2.2.x as 2.3.x should now be stable ?)

I'm aware that I can just enable zfs-testing repo, but this would render some other software ecosystem (like RSF-1) incompatible, since editors usually just follow the official OpenZFS releases for RHEL.

Perhaps I am making a false assumption, but this should also lower the maintenance burden for old releases.
Thanks for any insight.

[tonyhutter]

#17290

[drescherjm]

For what it's worth I have moved to the 2.2.X branch on my RHEL8 and RHEL9 (using Rocky Linux) servers at work about 1 year ago after the 2.2.4 release. I have over 400TB of storage on 5 servers and about 50 PCs on the network.

[deajan]

@drescherjm I also have some RHEL9 machines running 2.2.x branch with roughly 100TB each, but those are backup machines to they're rarely IO intensive. I currently encounter stability problmes with VMs running on top of 2.1.x branch, but only VMs that have heavy IO load.
I cannot confirm that this is zfs related, but it began happening only after I migrated from xfs to zfs in order to be able to replicate those VMs.