I built a TrueNAS storage server with Intel QuickAssist accelerator for ZFS back in 2022. It worked well for me. Since I am upgrading it to TrueNAS 25.04, I had to redo a lot of the past work. So I decided to write down everything. This article is not meant to be a comprehensive guide.
Also, the QAT support in ZFS is mostly a research product. It does not get much maintenance as you can see in git history.
The plan was building a TrueNAS storage server, but also using it host various containers and VMs for my services. Essentially, a all-in-one server (or all-in-BOOM if the server fails). Partly because my last NAS had hardware RAID card, and with limited hardware resource in the new server, I was looking at way to offload some ZFS work from the CPU. I did not find any ZFS specific accelerator that I can get cheaply on eBay utill I came across the QZFS paper in USENIX ATC'2019 (https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc19/presentation/hu-xiaokang). It demonstated a way to use the Intel QuickAssis