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What ZFS blockpointers are, zero-day rewards offered, KDE on FreeBSD status, new FreeBSD core team, NetBSD WiFi refresh, poor man’s CI, and the power of Ctrl+T. ##Headlines What ZFS block pointers are and what’s in them I’ve mentioned ZFS block pointers in the past; for example, when I wrote about some details of ZFS DVAs, I said that DVAs are embedded in block pointers. But I’ve never really looked carefully at what is in block pointers and what that means and implies for ZFS. The very simple way to describe a ZFS block pointer is that it’s what ZFS uses in places where other filesystems would simply put a block number. Just like block numbers but unlike things like ZFS dnodes, a block pointer isn’t a separate on-disk entity; instead it’s an on disk data format and an in memory structure that shows up in other things. To quote from the (draft and old) ZFS on-disk specification (PDF): A block pointer (blkptr_t) is a 128 byte ZFS structure used to physically locate, verify, and describe blocks of data on