Spotlight Issues on macOS Sonoma

[Ikukuru]

I eventually gave up on expecting it to work, and I developed a two-pronged solution: for the purpose of finding files I switched to Thomas Tempelmann's Find Any File utility (found at https://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/). FAF works well for my purposes, though it is not as fast as Spotlight.

I am trying FindAnyFile at your recommendation, but unless I am missing something, it does not index the files? If that is the case, then it really is not a substitute for Spotlight.

Corrupted spotlight databases on zfs volumes have been making my Mac crash, but I miss it sorely.

[Haravikk]

Corrupted spotlight databases on zfs volumes have been making my Mac crash, but I miss it sorely.

Do you mean your whole Mac or just the Spotlight "server" that answers search queries? If you're getting actual machine crashes (kernel panics) then that sounds like something much more severe – for me the corruption issue just causes Spotlight to keep re-indexing particular volumes and eventually fail, at which point the Spotlight server stops responding to search requests (so nothing gets returned, even for the volumes with working indexes).

Never had a kernel panic as a result of it, and wouldn't expect one as Spotlight runs as its own processes outside of the kernel.

[Ikukuru]

Mostly my experience has been that spotlight would stop functioning, as you say, but I ran into circumstances in trying to “fix” spotlight that caused zfs to identify spotlight db files as corrupted.

MacOS would crash and burn on import, triggering a reboot.

Debian could import, but zfs process would hang on any write operation of the spotlight folder.

This was a single disk usb nvme pool, so no redundancy.

I ended up recreating from backup, and not using spotlight, seems everything is ok.

So yeah, not exactly ideal zfs usage…

[0xdeadbeef]

What I have found is that Spotlight doesn't seem to like "deeper" hierarchies for mount points. Simply using "/Volumes/level1" as the mount point for a dataset works fine, but "/Volumes/level1/level2" makes Spotlight freak out as visible via "mdutil -s". Using "/Volumes/level1/level2/level3" works just fine, as long as nothing is mounted as "/Volumes/level1/level2". Some playing with standard macOS disk images with either HFS+ or APFS and mounting the .dmg's manually via diskutil to custom mountpoints exhibits the same problem. So it doesn't seem to be ZFS specific.