You really want a heavy weight like ZFS (which is a total memory hog, btw., I use it in my server) on Amiga hardware from 1992?
You should be happy, that there is such an update to AmigaOS at all !
I understand the enthusiasm. I used an A4000/Cyberstorm060/CyberGfx64 exclusively till 2001. I did not care, that each reboot would take 6 minutes (with starting all the background stuff) and that my system was runtime memory patched into oblivion, and no memory protection in the system. That it crashed 10 times a day (multiply this with boot times, HO HO!). But one day a day has come and one needs to realize: Reality!
I did upgrade: 128 MB FAST RAM, 64-bit MC68080 @ ~234 MHz with AMMX SIMD instructions, 16 GB industry grade CF and 8 GB microSDHC. OS 3.9 @ 1300 x 768 x 32-bit color HDMI.
"You really want a heavy weight like ZFS (which is a total memory hog, btw., I use it in my server) on Amiga hardware from 1992?"
Yes, I do, because as a Solaris engineer, I understand that ZFS will release memory due to memory pressure from applications, and can in fact run in memory constrained systems. Should be able to run on an Amiga with a Vampire accelerator and 129 MB of RAM. ZIL is auto tuned. Just don't use features like de-duplication and it'll be fine.
(My reboots take about three seconds, with or without the Vampire accelerator, and that's even with OS 3.9.)
Anyways, I know that feeling:
http://cd.textfiles.com/amigama/amigama199803/WWW/ctools/www...
There is even the Amiga reloaded project with a revised A500+ motherboard design coming out, and a new A500-A1200-A4000 hybrid motherboard being designed, so Amiga is far from dead, just very niche.
What hadn't kept pace is the OS: even the most modern AmigaOS 4.1 is far from capabilities of modern operating systems like illumos, and I mean very, very far behind.
Note blocks are <512byte because of that (ouch) and everything else about OFS sucks.
The Amiga OFS/FFS, etc. file system data structures scale with the block size (block sizes of 512, 1024, .., 65536 bytes are possible).
At 256 bytes per block, for example, the directory hash table size would shrink so much that you'd have so many hash collisions that it would be morbidly funny...
Anyway, the data blocks in OFS have to account for the checksum and some metadata which aids in recovery. So you are correct that the payload (488 bytes for a 512 byte block) is smaller than the raw block size.
The AmigaOS 3.9 NDK ("native development kit") is still relevant for the AmigaOS 3.1.4 update.
The 3.1.4 update added new API functionality, but these changes are few and could (= will) be covered separately.
Can't even do a software RAID 1+0.
Remember the cool old "AGA - time to upgrade - AGA" slogan in some of the demos? Now it's
ZFS - time to upgrade - ZFS
...it's the 21st century, and AmigaOS doesn't even have software RAID, let alone ZFS yet. We still have to check filesystems for metadata corruption, and checking them for data corruption is still science fiction. And nobody bats an eyelash, like it's the most normal thing in the world. Meanwhile, the capacitors are leaking like crazy, modern PC-bucket power supplies don't deliver steady 5V, the clock crystal loses or gains up to 5 seconds per day, even the newest accelerator hardware doesn't support ECC memory... what could possibly go wrong with one's data?