TrueNAS CORE lives on: Community splits off open source fork zVault
iXsystems will rely on the GNU/Linux version of TrueNAS in the future. The community continues to develop the FreeBSD version TrueNAS CORE in the zVault fork.
Web interface of zVault 13.3
(Image: Michael Plura)
- Michael Plura
The community has responded to the end of TrueNAS CORE with a fork. It wants to further develop the FreeBSD-based NAS operating system under the title zVault as an open-source project. Until now, users had to decide whether to continue using the largely unmaintained TrueNAS CORE, switch to the GNU/Linux-based version TrueNAS SCALE or migrate to a competitor product such as XigmaNAS. Since 2021, iXsystems has only released individual patches from 13.3 for the project based on FreeBSD 13.0 and focused on TrueNAS SCALE instead.
zVault removes proprietary files from TrueNAS fork
For the fork, the zVault team copied the freely available sources from TrueNAS CORE 13.3 and removed the trademark from the code. Kris Moore, head of development at iXsystems, congratulated the zVault developers on this move. However, he noted that some TrueNAS CORE files were proprietary and therefore protected by copyright. The developers then removed the affected 55 files and made the new ISO image available for download. As a result, zVault currently functions in exactly the same way as the original TrueNAS CORE from iXsystems.
In 2009, iXsystems took over the FreeBSD-based FreeNAS project. With version 12, the company discontinued the end-user version in April 2020 and transferred it to the commercial version TrueNAS CORE. At the same time, iXsystems announced a port of the project based on GNU/Linux for the target platform, Debian. Six months later, the first version of TrueNAS SCALE was released. However, it did not technically catch up with TrueNAS CORE until 2024 and has since recorded higher user numbers, so the company discontinued the FreeBSD version.
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With the current release 25.04 Fangtooth, TrueNAS SCALE has the Linux kernel 6.12 and an integration of OpenZFS 2.3.0 for storage space savings on NVMe-based systems. Incus provides the NAS operating system with support for LXC containers and QEMU/KVM virtualization. It also now uses Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) for direct data transfer between the main memories of two systems without detours via CPU, caches and operating system kernels.
(wpl)
