OpenZFS on OS X

Good morning all,

I have an old 2009 Mac Pro that I use for a home server. It boots El Capitan from a USB stick and the four internal drives are configured into a RAIDz.

On the RAIDz I have some VirtualBox virtual machines, and everything works great when the Mac is up and running. One of the VMs I run I use as a server providing various other services, and this should start during boot (via launchd as described in the VirtualBox manual). However, because the ZFS volumes don’t seem to be discovered until a user logs in the VM does not start when the Mac Pro is rebooted.

Auto-login is already being used for a separate user (for iTunes Home Sharing), and I’m pretty sure I can’t have multiple users auto-login…?

Is there a way, perhaps as part of the launchd service that starts my VM, to discover and mount ZFS volumes during boot?

Many thanks,
Ben

Would anyone be able to supply/point me to an overview of how ZFS is loaded/started on OS X? I've had a look around the Wiki but can't find anything about the process...

The ZFS kexts are loaded at boot by the OS. There is an auto-import script run by launchd which imports/mounts the filesystems. The ZFS filesystems can take a while to be imported, which may lead to the incorrect assumption that they are not available until a user logs in.

Brendon

Interesting, thank you Brendon.

I was looking for a way to perhaps make the VirtualBox boot job depend on ZFS, but it seems that Launchd isn't designed for that….

Back to the drawing board!

You could add content to our script after the import?

Oh that's very true! I'll take a look into it when I have time

Many thanks for your help!