NetBSD is a fast, secure, BSD-based Unix-like open source operating system. It can be used on a variety of platforms, from large servers and powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices. NetBSD currently uses the FFS file system by default, and its support for ZFS is constantly improving.

Four days ago, NetBSD developer kusumi created a GitHub repository called “NetBSD HAMMER2“, and the introduction says “HAMMER2 filesystem for NetBSD”. It’s worth noting that kusumi is also working on porting HAMMER2 to FreeBSD.

This means that the NetBSD operating system is expected to receive initial support for the advanced HAMMER2 filesystem soon.

HAMMER is a highly available 64-bit filesystem originally developed by Matthew Dillon for DragonFly BSD. Its key features include instant crash recovery, unlimited NFS exportable snapshots, master-slave operations, configurable history retention, and more. HAMMER also supports block deduplication, meaning that identical blocks are only stored once in the file system.

HAMMER is also DragonFly’s default filesystem. The follow-up HAMMER2 was announced in 2011, went through a long incubation and development period, and finally became the default file system in Dragonfly 5.2 (April 2018).

In the detailed introduction of the warehouse, the developer stated that the initial goal is read-only support, but once the read-only support is completed, write support is also planned to be added. Beyond that, there is currently limited information about adding HAMMER2 filesystem support to NetBSD, and we will continue to monitor this change.