OpenZFS on OS X

Given :
1. Oracle is de-emphasizing ZFS and pushing btrfs
2. Apple announced MacOS
3. Apple also announced APFS which has a lot of the features of ZFS

So why bother with ZFS?
Are the developers going to bother to move forward with a file system that Oracle has lost interest in when there is an equivalent supported vendor provided solution?

I have a lot of stuff under a ZFS mirror and am wondering if I need to start migrating it

zslg01 wrote:Given :
1. Oracle is de-emphasizing ZFS and pushing btrfs

Nobody has cared about Oracles ZFS since they made it closed-source. So not entirely sure why that matters here, OpenZFS is a separate thing.

zslg01 wrote:2. Apple announced MacOS

Not sure why you list this, there has been 3 major releases of OSX since I started. There is the name rebranding sure, but perhaps they want to leave OS version 10 and move to 11.

zslg01 wrote:3. Apple also announced APFS which has a lot of the features of ZFS

This one is interesting. On one hand, maybe they will finally fix some of the issues in XNU where everything assumes the filesystem is HFS, and that boot is HFS etc. If they bring in a second fs, they will have to make things more modular so we can fit in better.
HFS really needs to be replaced, so this is a good thing. I see it in a positive light.

Now, one of *my* reasons for using ZFS is that is platform independent, btrfs, and apfs are locking you into one platform.

Now, one of *my* reasons for using ZFS is that is platform independent

Ditto. Maybe btrfs will be ported to other systems, but we can be pretty damn sure that any Apple file system won't be.

Still too early to say, but APFS does seem to have quite a few differences to ZFS. A professional's analysis here:
http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part1/
I'm sticking with ZFS for now.

As Lundman said, APFS is great news for ZFS On OSX as it could resolve some the of the issues for ZFS dealing with a kernel that's monolithic towards HFS+ only.

And!

Evan has been busy already getting OSX to boot on ZFS!

evansus commented on this issue 2 days ago.
Latest branch, just merged from master (1.5.2) and undergoing testing:
https://github.com/evansus/zfs-1/tree/ldi-boot

Have been running stable from this commit:
https://github.com/evansus/zfs-1/tree/6 ... c5743323f7

Has Xmas come early or something!?!?

Well you can understand my confusion if you read the README.md in the OpenZFS source directory. Something along the lines of "... OpenZFS will track Illuminos closely..."....
Maybe the READMEs just need to be re-written and all references to Illuminos removed?

Without being harsh, I'm afraid that it's you that is confused. Illumos is not Solaris, rather it's a fork of the OpenSolaris effort that existed before Oracle closed Solaris again. I forget which Solaris release it is based on - may have been version 10 or 11.

Illumos contains OpenZFS which is our ultimate upstream source for the core ZFS code (which is not the same as the Oracle ZFS code, they have evolved in different directions).

HTH.

- Brendon

I stand corrected and after reading the analysis of Apple's file system I hope sincerely that the O3X people keep working on it.

Since btrfs was mentioned earlier in the thread, perhaps this might be of interest:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Btrfs-RAID-56-Is-Bad

The Btrfs RAID 5/6 code has been called as much as fatally flawed -- "more or less fatally flawed, and a full scrap and rewrite to an entirely different raid56 mode on-disk format may be necessary to fix it. And what's even clearer is that people /really/ shouldn't be using raid56 mode for anything but testing with throw-away data, at this point. Anything else is simply irresponsible."

Yeah, I think I'll stick with ZFS on OS X.

I think I need a re-think on this after Apple's recent announcements (late 2016). No Mac Pro upgrade, MacBook Pro with limited connectivity options, etc, etc ,etc.
I plan on moving to Linux Mint for my server needs since ZFS works perfectly well there and at least there seems to be a way forward for servers in that option.