What information I want out of ZFS tools and libraries

February 26, 2012

Back in comments on my observation that Solaris 11 is closed source, Joshua M. Clulow noted that the Illumos people are working on making a better (and presumably public) version of libzfs, the nominal interface for dealing with ZFS. Although I've moved slowly on this, I think it's time to write down my thoughts about what I want for dealing with ZFS.

First off, my needs are probably somewhat unusual. I don't actually want to do anything to ZFS through libzfs; I just want to extract information. I also mostly don't care if I get an actual C-level API or simply some tools that give me information; either is about as convenient to me, since I'm actually going to consume the information in a non-C environment (either shell scripts or Python, depending on just what we're doing).

What I do need is three things: a stable and documented interface, information in a form that I can easily parse and interpret reliably, and complete information (not just things that have been cooked into some user-friendly form that elides details). The output of current zpool and zfs commands are none of these three; exact output is neither stable nor documented, it's very hard to parse, and it's not complete. What we current get through (ab)using Solaris's current libzfs is complete and easy to 'parse' (C structures are easy to deal with in one sense), but it's not stable or documented.

(I have a moderate bias towards a stable C API for libzfs because at this point I'd rather roll my own information extraction stuff than trust ZFS's own commands, and it's harder to cheat or omit things in a C API. And I don't have to worry that people will feel that, eg, XML is the perfect output format.)

Currently, we need two sorts of information; we need configuration information and pool state information. Configuration information covers things like what disks the pool uses and how it's organized, what filesystems there are, what snapshots there are, and so on. We use this both passively (we periodically record basic information about all pools for tracking purposes) and actively (knowing what disks are in use and how is a vital part of our spares system). Pool state information covers the health of disks in the pool and the state of things like resilvers and scrubs; we use this both for ongoing health monitoring and as part of our spares system.

(We don't currently need to extract performance data but we might at some point in the future.)

As for what specific pieces of configuration and state information we want, the likely answer is 'all of it'. If ZFS tracks it at all, I'm at least potentially interested in it.

Sidebar: how to test a proposed ZFS API

My rather obvious advice to anyone designing a public API for getting ZFS information is to test it by rewriting the information display portions of zpool and zfs using only the public API. If you can't do it at all, the API has obviously failed. However, if the API doesn't give you any extra information over what those two commands need today, it also fails, because both commands don't display most of the available information about configuration and state.

Generally you should be able to use the API to write an absurdly more verbose version of zpool status, one that will deluge you in a pile of detailed information.

Written on 26 February 2012.
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Last modified: Sun Feb 26 22:15:29 2012
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