OpenZFS on OS X

I'm now running with my 300+ GB home directory on ZFS and I wanted to say thanks! Performance is great and it's a good feeling knowing my data is sitting on ZFS.

Hi TomSoutherland,

You would be one of the few people running with their home directory on ZFS. Please let us know if you notice any particular issues related to doing this.

Cheers
Brendon

TomSoutherland wrote:I'm now running with my 300+ GB home directory on ZFS and I wanted to say thanks! Performance is great and it's a good feeling knowing my data is sitting on ZFS.

Issues... Hmmm.... Other than some weirdness once in a while when booting from my CarbonCopy clone, it's been rock solid. When switching boot disks, I have to boot with '-s -f' and manually import the pool. Once this is done, subsequent boots from the same disk do not present this problem.

I've just started an automated snapshot program I wrote in perl which resembles the auto-snapshot feature introduced in opensolaris. I notice the snapshots don't automagically mount the '.zfs/snapshot/...' directory. I'm not sure if this is a Mac specific issue or not. I can still mount them using 'zfs mount snapshot_name' so it's not a problem.

I gotta say though, this is working very well so far and I've even tested migrating disks between my Mac and my Ubuntu server. Very nice indeed!

I do to. I thought this would be a common use-case. Snapshot for the homedir is awesome.

If anyone is interested in the snapshots, and setups, I use: https://github.com/bdrewery/zfstools

TomSoutherland wrote: I notice the snapshots don't automagically mount the '.zfs/snapshot/...' directory. I'm not sure if this is a Mac specific issue or not. I can still mount them using 'zfs mount snapshot_name' so it's not a problem.

Yes, this is in the FAQ:

https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/FAQ#Q.29_ ... ctories.3F

We have not, and perhaps may not, implement snapshot auto-mounting. This is not a bug, just a feature that would need someone to spend time on. It's debatable whether this is even a desirable feature, because it's nice not to have "ls -alR /foo" trigger it to start "furiously mounting every snapshot," as lundman has pointed out.

Thank You very much for bringing openzfs to osx.