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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2vIdPmsnTI#t=44m53s

The above video is an explanation of a bunch of the barriers to implementing block pointer rewrites. The conclusion is that it would make the code a lot more complicated and break a lot of the layering, and probably make addition of other new features a lot harder. Even a standalone offline rewriting tool wouldn't necessarily be accepted into the OpenZFS codebase because of the maintenance burden. Their advice is that if you think you need that feature to solve a particular problem, you should be looking for a workaround to solve that problem without requiring the huge block pointer rewrite project (which nobody's working on), even if the workarounds have a significant and permanent performance impact.

When you take into account how long the feature's been in demand and been on the roadmaps under "eventually", it's clearly not going to happen anytime soon and won't happen without a major change to how ZFS development is being done. It's not definitely impossible, but it's perpetually several years away from happening. With btrfs already having it's equivalent to that feature and stealing an ever-growing slice of the users who need that feature, it's probably never going to happen for ZFS.



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