According to this Seagate presentation there are some ongoing (?) efforts targeted toward modification of ext4 file system introducing SMRFS -EXT4 - support of host managed hard drives. The goal is to provide layer that will hide specifics of ZAC commands from applications (I believe). There is also this document that claims that "As of kernel v 4.7... Host managed drives are exposed as SG node - No block device file". What does it mean? maybe these document are outdated and ext4 (or other common linux file system) has been added support for host aware HDD. What linux distro support Host Managed HDD by file system? If such support exists - What steps are needed to get Host Managed HDD up and running without changes in applications (where file system hides all specifics)? General applications like DB are my concern - not log style.
Also there is such video (SDC2020: Improve Distributed Storage System TCO with Host-Managed SMR HDDs) that claims that starting from 4.10 linux kernel f2fs supports host managed drives already - did you used such approach? Maybe f2fs is not best match for random operations but I hope f2fs can fulfill such tasks with acceptable performance (where reading is dominant)
Updated:
There are solutions: f2fs starting from linux 4.10 and Device Mapper from 4.13:
But I'm not sure whether it works in practice. What distributions support Host Managed better:
list of linux distro with level of support for block zoned devices
