OpenZFS on OS X

HI, since upgrading to openzfs 1.7.4 and OS X Mojave, spotlight search on my ZFS volume doesn't seem to work. I tried to rebuild the spotlight index following the instructions at this website, but it didn't help. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716


Thanks so much

I just came here to post that Spotlight is going nuts on 1.7.4 under 10.13 as well and see if anyone else had seen anything . It was always somewhat unreliable, but it would at least work much of the time and index for a while then stop. Since upgrading though I've seen it run constantly, with mds and mds_store pegging a few cores, mds_store consuming ever increasing amounts of memory (I just killed it again, it had reached over 64 GB and heavily slowed down the system of course). As soon as I kill them they restart, and mds_store is increasing real and private mem usage by at least 10-20 megs a minute. I haven't tried blowing away all indexes or anything yet, but this is definitely new behavior regardless. I've got my main user folder on native ZFS and Mail.app is always a good test case of whether Spotlight is functioning properly since it depends on it for searches and smart folders and the like, it used to work intermittently at least but not at all since 1.7.4.

At any rate I don't think it's just a Mojave problem. I'm going to restart and try clearing indexes on all the ZFS volumes to see what happens. Happy to provide any details on pool config that might be relevant. Right now on this system I'm not using HFS formatted ZVOLs at all, blew them all away during a previous upgrade, so it's just right on ZFS. I might try at least one to see if it fixes odd compile/build problems with MacPorts though.

Yes, I notice the process runs and there is hard drive activity but despite waiting overnight, the indexing doesn’t seem to result in spotlight searches that work.

Do you also see endless Error level log spam to the effect of "mds_stores: Reaffirming index emergency state to true"?

Edit: Yeesh, I'm seeing nearly 2000 entries per second, and it looks like mds_stores has also been crashing constantly in the background since upgrading. Something is definitely completely fubar'd there. I think I'm going to have to temporarily disable spotlight entirely, this is wild.

Wow, I don't actually know how to easily disable Spotlight anymore :\. The old launchctl unload is no good because of SIP, but launchctl disable system/com.apple.metadata.mds seems to have zero effect also despite reporting no error. Kill/Stop work fine but of course it instantly gets recreated per documentation. mdutil -a -i off has no effect.

FFS Apple.

At any rate I don't think it's just a Mojave problem.

I've had 1.7.4 running on High Sierra for a while, 2 separate machines, and no trouble with spotlight, indexing or logging. I do have SIP off on both machines.

FadingIntoBlue wrote:

At any rate I don't think it's just a Mojave problem.

I've had 1.7.4 running on High Sierra for a while, 2 separate machines, and no trouble with spotlight, indexing or logging. I do have SIP off on both machines.

So not OS specific, but also something to do with our specific configurations not a universal. Having SIP off though definitely shouldn't be necessary, but I'll try that first since I'd need to do it just to disable spotlight anyway apparently.

Did anyone ever have any progress on mitigating this or figuring out a cause short of fully disabling Spotlight?

I've encountered the same problem w/ 1.8.1 on Mojave on my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014) I first tried rebuilding index but did not work. Then I set

Code: Select all

com.apple.mimic_hfs=on

and rebuilt index and spotlight was back. The mystery is that my MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014) did not experience such problem...

re: disabling Spotlight, does simply adding ZFS disks to the list of excluded locations not work? It's in System Preferences → Spotlight → Privacy