1.7.2 general observation

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1.7.2 general observation

Postby macz » Tue Apr 03, 2018 5:36 am

so.. I am a bit out of it with a bad head cold and its early morning

I don't have high sierra running on my server and don't have 1.7.2 loaded up but wanted to ask a question about a new feature being listed

so @ilovezfs does this new feature indicate that you will start treating pools as a native /dev/disk device?

if so.. an observation

when apple and the 10a286? development release for snow leopard I think.. they didn't mount the pool or treat it as a dev.. I believe they granulated it down to the zfs file system level. which really makes more sense when you look at what ZFS aims to improve.. and at its most basic level.. the pool exists only to fully abstract the underlying storage.. so that we no longer had to think of disks or be constrained by them.. only the created zfs file systems as the could be much more flexible and configurable.. with the pool being the abstracted resource that held them..

in parlance.. it would be like instead of controlling VMs on a esxi host.. we could only control the host.. we don't care about the host or a cluster of hosts.. that is the resource abstraction ..the VMs are what are defined, controlled, and monitored.. if that makes sense...

so simply.. 'hide' the pool from finder ops and only expose individual zfs dataset/filesystems .. perhaps with a OS X only feature flag... finder enabled/disabled..
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Re: 1.7.2 general observation

Postby lundman » Tue Apr 03, 2018 8:38 pm

The point of that is to make a mount (dataset) have a /dev/disk* source in "df" or "mount" output. As many programs/installers will check for (the literal string) "/dev/disk" to know if it is a disk or not, as recommended (!) by Apple themselves. Even APFS does this pseudo disk for mounts (nee synthesized).

That it is by default only set on "pool" is just a convenience, so that when foreign pools imported, will show at least 1 dataset with /dev/disk. It is expected that users would most likely set devdisk=off for the whole pool (and everything else with inherit), then enable it for their /Applications dataset, or similar.

Perhaps 10a286 simply set the default canmount=off of pool's dataset, which you could also do if you wanted that style. But since all foreign pools default to mounting everything, including the pool's dataset, we would not make that change to the defaults.
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Re: 1.7.2 general observation

Postby macz » Wed Apr 04, 2018 4:01 am

thanks for the well laid out explanation lundman.. appreciate it

I remember having a conversation with you way back about ... what is it.. issue 119 or something that was very apple file system centric..

the issue was... oversimplified.. how to make zfs more mac finder like without breaking openzfs compatibility...

perhaps the only way is to have some middleware that would essentially set up pools and datasets for finder/system compatibility using underlying zfs functions.. therefor not breaking portability but automating the setup at bit

any who.. keep up the great work guys.. really appreciate all the effort to keep OS X in the ZFS game...
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Re: 1.7.2 general observation

Postby lundman » Wed Apr 04, 2018 4:11 pm

Yep, the famous issue 116 - which is what we merged. The ultimate goal is to have the OSX Installer recognise a ZFS dataset as a valid destination. However, the "OS Can Be Installed" boolean in "diskutil info" is turning out to be a real mystery.
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