Currently, the latest version of ZFSonLinux for Debian Stretch backport is 0.7.12. However, it is an old version. The current stable upstream is on version 0.8.3. Everyone is focused on updating it for Debian Buster but not for Stretch.

There are a lot of features that were included in version 0.8. Let's install the latest version in Stretch.

Install dependencies

apt-get update
apt-get -y install build-essential autoconf automake libtool gawk alien 
apt-get -y install fakeroot || true
apt-get -y install dkms libblkid-dev uuid-dev libudev-dev libssl-dev
apt-get -y install zlib1g-dev libaio-dev libattr1-dev libelf-dev 
apt-get -y install linux-headers-$(uname -r) 
apt-get -y install python3 python3-dev python3-setuptools python3-cffi libffi-dev

Build deb packages

Get the latest version from https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases and build deb packages of ZFSonLinux.

wget https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases/download/zfs-0.8.3/zfs-0.8.3.tar.gz
tar -vxzf zfs-0.8.3.tar.gz
cd zfs-0.8.3
 
./configure --with-config=srpm
make -j1 pkg-utils deb-dkms

After the build is complete, you will get the following *.deb files:

• libnvpair1_0.8.3-1_amd64.deb
• libuutil1_0.8.3-1_amd64.deb
• libzfs2_0.8.3-1_amd64.deb
• libzfs2-devel_0.8.3-1_amd64.deb
• libzpool2_0.8.3-1_amd64.deb
• python3-pyzfs_0.8.3-1_amd64.deb
• zfs_0.8.3-1_amd64.deb
• zfs-dkms_0.8.3-1_amd64.deb
• zfs-dracut_0.8.3-1_amd64.deb
• zfs-initramfs_0.8.3-1_amd64.deb
• zfs-test_0.8.3-1_amd64.deb

Install deb packages

Install all the deb packages.

for file in *.deb; do dpkg -i $file; done

Check version installed

modinfo zfs | grep ^version
    # version:        0.8.3-1