ZFS: no-op overwrites

There is an interesting new feature in ZFS in Illumos.

https://www.illumos.org/issues/3236

When overwriting a block which is check summed with a cryptographically secure hash function we can compare the old and new checksums for the block to determine if they differ (at almost no cost since we were going to do the checksums anyway). If they do not differ we don't actually need to do the write. This:
1) Reduces I/O
2) Reduces space usage, because if the old block is referenced by a snapshot we will need to keep both copies of the block around even though they contain the same data.
This functionality is only enabled if:
1) The old and new blocks are checksummed using the same algorithm.
2) That algorithm is cryptographically secure (e.g. sha256)
3) Compression is enabled on that block.

 Philosophical question - should we just trust sha256?

(it seems this can't be disabled nor there is an option similar to verify=on in dedup).

There are more interesting new zfs features in Illumos (for example this one which does a similar thing to what Solaris 11 does). The only regret is that unless one wants to play with one of the appliances based on Illumos the only way to use these features is to use FreeBSD or Linux, which is rather ironic. But on the other hand - why not? At least at home.