OpenZFS on OS X

So I have an M1 mini currently running ZFS 2.2.2-1 on macOS Sonoma 14.7.1

I didn't upgrade to macOS 15 Sequoia because there were no "stable" ZFS builds for Sequoia at the time I looked.

I now see that there is an RC for 2.3.0, which includes a Sequoia build.


So my question is: which do I upgrade first?

My first thought is to upgrade ZFS to 2.3.0 using the Sonoma installer; confirm it works properly; upgrade macOS to Sequoia; possibly "upgrade" ZFS again to the Sequoia build.
Besides doing an export of the pool before the ZFS upgrade, is there any other recommended procedure here?

What about: zfs export; disconnect the hardware (the ZFS drives are all external over TB3); upgrade macOS; upgrade ZFS; reconnect and import the pool?


Cheers

Hi, as you can see our community seems to be shrinking, in terms of interaction and knowledge, down to a few die-hards (raises hand). I'll give you my take on your question.

In the past Mr. Lundman has released some of the ZFS software specifically labeled as compatible with a less-than-latest release (say, Catalina), and told us that it can be used for later releases (Monterey, for example). That would argue for upgrading your system to the latest labeled ZFS release for Sonoma first, under the assumption that it will probably also function in the later release. Then I would upgrade the operating system, and see where you stand: does everything ZFS-related work? If so, I would stop there, or at the very lease image your system to a bootable backup that you can roll back to, if necessary, before upgrading to a Sequoia-specific ZFS release.

For a few of the past major macOS upgrades I've not had any problems upgrading macOS first and updating ZFS after that. If memory serves me well I didn't even do the ZFS update for a while on my MacMini running headless dutie

What I've done before those major macOS updates is to export the pools on that machine to avoid the macOS upgrade stuff stumbling over something it doesn't expect. Sometimes I forget about it, at least once that caused the upgrade to fail.

Sharko wrote:Hi, as you can see our community seems to be shrinking, in terms of interaction and knowledge, down to a few die-hards (raises hand). I'll give you my take on your question.

*raising my hand as well*

All my important data goes on ZFS for a long time now, essentially since it got added to FreeBSD back around 2008 or so. I've been bitten by data loss once too often.
Got a buch of pools on various of Macs (HDD, SATA SSD, M.2 NVMe, U.2 NVMe) and FreeBSD servers of mine in an actual datacenter.

Well StephenR, now that Tahoe has come out, I find myself in the same boat as you. On Sonoma, and figure I guess it's about time to upgrade to Sequoia. (I'm very comfortable staying one release behind the "latest greatest"...)

Just wondering which path you took, and how it worked out for you? As the ZFS grey hairs here seemed to have advocated "up to you, either path has worked ok..."

(For the record, I duly respect any opinion coming from folks who joined the this board in 2016! I have a few grey hairs of my own, and will now check my compuserve email I've had since 1989 to see if there are any remedies.)

Kind regards,
Max