by MarkInSeattle » Wed Jun 07, 2023 8:42 pm
Thank-you very much. As you correctly guessed if my upgrade is successful, Monterey and OpenZFS will be running on an Intel i9. Have done several data backups to local NAS and offsite, including a MacOS backup of Catalina using Carbon Copy Cloner to external USB-C NVME drive. To anyone else thinking about upgrading their MacOS, you should of course make sure as much data as possible has been backed up to multiple destinations (if you have them available). In my opinion, a RAID is not really a multiple device target when archiving data you can't afford to lose.
I will upgrade to Monterey and report back. Any issues are on me, but I appreciate the suggestion that OpenZFS should run OK under Monterey having previously been installed and running well under Catalina.
-- mark early
UPDATE -- Success upgrading MacOS from Catalina --> Monterey and still maintaining access to my zpools under OpenZFS - on Mac v2.1.0-1.... excellent. Everything is working well.
Only ZFS problem is related to my MBP-m1 laptop running Ventura (latest v13.4 ?). Reading posts on this forum some cited mixed success running OpenZFS on m1 CPU systems (Big Sur, Monterey and Ventura(?)), using: "OpenZFSonOsX-2.1.0-Big.Sur-11-arm64". I tried that v2.10 package for arm64, however, Ventura reported that perhaps the ZFS kexts were not loading due to security policy conflicts. Attempted to resolve them from the recovery environment, but this resulted in my MBP-m1 looping continuously with bootup errors, which were only fixed by restoring the prior security policy config in the recovery environment. So I could once again boot into Ventura desktop but not with ZFS functions.
At the time I downloaded from openzfsonosx.org it seemed "OpenZFSonOsX-2.1.0-Big.Sur-11-arm64" was the latest available arm64 compiled package. Currently I see: "OpenZFSonOsX-2.1.6-Ventura-13-arm64" is available. I will try that on my m1 MBP soon.
Later ....
Followed this OpenZFS uninstall procedure to remove : "OpenZFSonOsX-2.1.0-Big.Sur-11-arm64"
Boot into recovery mode
Launch Terminal
# kmutil trigger-panic-medic --volume-root /Volumes/<YourVolumeName>
As in "/Volumes/MacintoshHD" or similar.
reboot normally.
trigger-panic-medic will remove all 3rd party kexts, so you need to "Approve" any kexts
you want to keep, just make sure to skip zfs.kext.
Clean up all files:
# sudo rm -rf /Library/Extensions/zfs.kext /usr/local/zfs/
Installed "OpenZFSonOsX-2.1.6-Ventura-13-arm64" without any problems. However, MacOS(?) warning message appeared suggesting I should use the Recovery Environment to enable new kexts ... I think using the Security Policy Utility. Rebooted into Recovery Environment and modified the Security Policy as I had before following earlier "OpenZFSonOsX-2.1.0-Big.Sur-11-arm64" install.
Changed the Security Policy to allow kext extensions from Apple and approved non-Apple sources.
Rebooted, this time without any problems back into the Ventura desktop successfully. Before with the prior "OpenZFSonOsX-2.1.0-Big.Sur-11-arm64" install, I wasn't able to boot into MacOS at all. So this seemed to be progress, however, from terminal when I try to run ZFS commands I am told: "The ZFS modules are not loaded". Currently, I do not have any zpools attached to the MBP-m1 running Ventura. Earlier with the BigSur version of OpenZFS when I tried to create a new zpool from a blank externally attached HD that had been initialized by MacOS Disk Utility the same error message: "The ZFS modules are not loaded" was displayed. Wondering if OpenZFS must see an existing zpool attached before it loads the modules .... grasping at straws here.
Not sure how to proceed at this juncture to correctly load the "ZFS modules".
Appreciate being pointed to a forum discussion that might have some suggestions under Ventura on an m1 Mac.
-- thank you