Delegating ZFS Permissions

You can use the zfs allow command to delegate permissions on ZFS file systems to non-root users in the following ways:

• Individual permissions can be delegated to a user, group, or everyone.

• Groups of individual permissions can be delegated as a permission set to a user, group, or everyone.

• Permissions can be delegated either locally to the current file system only or to all descendants of the current file system.

The following table describes the operations that can be delegated and any dependent permissions that are required to perform the delegated operations.

Permission (Subcommand)	Description	Dependencies
allow	The permission to grant permissions that you have to another user.	Must also have the permission that is being allowed.
clone	The permission to clone any of the dataset's snapshots.	Must also have the create permission and the mount permission in the original file system.
create	The permission to create descendant datasets.	Must also have the mount permission.
destroy	The permission to destroy a dataset.	Must also have the mount permission.
diff	The permission to identify paths within a dataset.	Non-root users need this permission to use the zfs diff command.
hold	The permission to hold a snapshot.
mount	The permission to mount and unmount a file system, and create and destroy volume device links.
promote	The permission to promote a clone to a dataset.	Must also have the mount permission and the promote permission in the original file system.
receive	The permission to create descendant file systems with the zfs receive command.	Must also have the mount permission and the create permission.
release	The permission to release a snapshot hold, which might destroy the snapshot.
rename	The permission to rename a dataset.	Must also have the create permission and the mount permission in the new parent.
rollback	The permission to roll back a snapshot.
send	The permission to send a snapshot stream.
share	The permission to share and unshare a file system.	Must have both share and share.nfs to create an NFS share. Must have both share and share.smb to create an SMB share.
snapshot	The permission to create a snapshot of a dataset.

You can delegate the following set of permissions but a permission might be limited to access, read, or change permission:

• groupquota

• groupused

• key

• keychange

• userprop

• userquota

• userused

In addition, you can delegate administration of the following ZFS properties to non-root users:

• aclinherit

• aclmode

• atime

• canmount

• casesensitivity

• checksum

• compression

• copies

• dedup

• defaultgroupquota

• defaultuserquota

• devices

• encryption

• exec

• keysource

• logbias

• mountpoint

• nbmand

• normalization

• primarycache

• quota

• readonly

• recordsize

• refquota

• refreservation

• reservation

• rstchown

• secondarycache

• setuid

• shadow

• share.nfs

• share.smb

• snapdir

• sync

• utf8only

• version

• volblocksize

• volsize

• vscan

• xattr

• zoned

Some of these properties can be set only at dataset creation time. For a description of these properties, see zfs(8).