GoKawiilOpenBSD gets early experimental port of Plan 9's GEFS filesystem
Developer ori has released a very early, buggy preview of GEFS—a crash-safe, snapshotting, copy-on-write filesystem originally built for Plan 9's 9front—running on OpenBSD. The port, under 9,000 lines of kernel code, is not intended for production use, with data loss expected especially during error conditions, and is not being proposed for inclusion in the OpenBSD tree yet.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
Bringing a modern copy-on-write, snapshot-capable filesystem to OpenBSD would close a long-standing gap compared to systems like ZFS or Btrfs on other platforms. The early preview invites community scrutiny of unresolved issues like consistency protocols and error handling before the project matures toward production readiness.
- GEFS is a crash-safe, snapshotting, copy-on-write filesystem originally developed for Plan 9's 9front.
- The OpenBSD port is experimental, buggy, and prone to data loss—not ready for real use.
- Key unsolved problems include write-ordering consistency guarantees and largely disabled error handling.
Source: marc.info, 2026-09-15
Published there as: “GEFS on OpenBSD: A Early Preview”
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