Encryption is one possible filter one could apply to data before it goes to the block device. Another is compression. I guess ZFS has that one also covered. Chould ZFS provide some generic way to apply different such filters which would be applied to each "mirror"?
No, datasets do not map to vdevs (mirrors). Since it came up in another comment as well: a dataset is a child object of a pool, but it is also the root-object of a subtree that consumes storage in that pool. To the user this dataset is presented as either a filesystem or a blockdevice to name the two most common options.
Apart from internal accounting things like the spacemap, every consumed storage space in a zpool belongs to a dataset in some way. It might be a data block for a file in that dataset, or it might be an old storage block still referenced by a snapshot of a dataset.
A lot of zfs commands work on datasets (send/receive, snapshot, clone, ...). They are also the point where settings such as compression, deduplication etc can be enabled/disabled as well as traditional filesystem mount options like noatime or noexec.
All the datasets consume storage from the pool, which dynamically stripes over all configured vdevs. If you enable an option for a dataset, you enable it for all storage of that dataset which ends up on all vdevs. You can not delegate a dataset to a specific vdev and then enable some option on that vdev.
Also sorry to everyone who knows enough about ZFS internals to realize that I just took their design, pulled it behind a shed and hit it with a blunt, heavy object.
Encryption is one possible filter one could apply to data before it goes to the block device. Another is compression. I guess ZFS has that one also covered. Chould ZFS provide some generic way to apply different such filters which would be applied to each "mirror"?