Has anyone else in Sussex Mac User Group (SMUG) used ZFS?

[Graham Perrin]

A quick show of hands, please: 

* who, in this group, has used ZFS on a Mac – or on any other platform?

(I'm involved in both ZEVO and OpenZFS communities. Curious to see whether there's any ZFS interest within SMUG.)

[Sam - MacAmbulance]

I've experimented with it, but ultimately went for a NAS drive instead of a ZFS pool local to my MacPro.

Regards

Sam

MacAmbulance Ltd. Providing Affordable Mac/PC Support and Web Development Sam Mullen +44 (0)7747778022 in...@macambulance.co.uk www.macambulance.co.uk MacAmbulance Ltd. is a registered company in England & Wales, registration number 8466597 This email is intended solely for the addressed recipients and may contain privileged or confidential information. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender and delete the email immediately.

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[Graham Perrin]

On Thursday, 10 October 2013 10:46:45 UTC+1, Sam - MacAmbulance wrote:

I've experimented with it …

MacZFS or ZEVO?

 

ultimately went for a NAS …

ZFS-based? 

I toyed with FreeNAS 9.x recently. 

G

[Sam - MacAmbulance]

It was maczfs with a few direct attached drives via esata, the write performance was nowhere near the synology nas I got, and that serves out all my multimedia as well

Sam

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MacAmbulance

Sam Mullen

07747778022

in...@macambulance.co.uk

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[John Patrick]

I've used ZFS but only on Solaris systems, keep thinking about trying it out on Mac and Linux systems but never seam to get around to it.

Now OpenSolaris died and so the opensource drive to keep that active, it seams to have stagnated behind the functionality provided by the Solaris version and all the issues with copyright, kernel mobiles vs user modules.

John

[Graham Perrin]

For a moment, comparing ZFS for Mac with ZFS in modern versions of Solaris …

Encryption

File system-level encryption for ZEVO and/or OpenZFS is very near the top of my wish list. <http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Projects#Platform_agnostic_encryption_support> reflects the OpenZFS developer communities' preference for compatibility with Oracle's closed implementation. 

Encrypted ZFS; and then I can free myself from the constraints of Apple Core Storage!

Encryption aside

I have no immediate need for the other features that Oracle added to closed source Solaris. YMMV :-)

Open-source activities

On Thursday, 10 October 2013 13:53:47 UTC+1, John Patrick wrote:

… OpenSolaris died and so the opensource drive to keep that active, it seams to have stagnated

Truly, for a long time it was hard (for people like me) to get the big picture. 

Since OpenZFS launched, it should be easier to see how much has happened since the 2010 fork from the last release of OpenSolaris. My favourite quote from recent weeks: 

"… To some degree, OpenZFS is just putting a name to what we have already been doing as a community …"

– Eric Schrock (tweeted by me at <https://twitter.com/grahamperrin/status/380395699734466560>). 

 

behind the functionality provided by the Solaris version

FYI <http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Talk:FAQ#Usability_of_Oracle_ZFS_pool_versions_29_and_greater> 

 

and all the issues with copyright, kernel mobiles vs user modules.

Licensing issues are frequently discussed but – as I see things – ultimately not an impediment to development. 

Linux perspective: <http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Talk:FAQ#Linux_licensing_questions> for some points of discussion that were spun off from the main FAQ page. Essentially: 

* it's fine to build and redistribute binary ZFS kernel modules. 

My Mac perspective: 

* in the respective licenses, there's nothing to prevent Apple from making great use of ZFS-related software. 

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6403566> for a Mac-related point from Hacker News discussion of the OpenZFS launch <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6400175>. 

GP

[Graham Perrin]

On Thursday, 7 January 2016 17:46:17 UTC, John Patrick wrote:

hiya,

more sys admin, dev ops or developer, question, but has anyone got zfs mounted on a mac.

cheers,

john

Amongst the most recent interesting developments:

• persistent L2ARC, which may be thought of (in some cases) as a Fusion Drive that survives when the fast media e.g. solid state drive is temporarily disconnected – I'll have links for that later
• work towards multiplatform (OpenZFS-oriented) encryption https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/494#issuecomment-180720347 is where I last commented on that development.

https://fuzzy.wordpress.com/2015/11/07/os-x-10-9-5-stops-responding-with-openzfs-on-os-x-1-4-5/ reflects my most recent experience with OpenZFS on OS X. My testing was in some ways more aggressive than an 'average' end user. YMMV; you may find it entirely trouble-free.

For me the best OS for ZFS is PC-BSD, http://www.pcbsd.org/ – the most recent release (10.2) is certainly not for all Macs, but a future release (11.0 or beyond) almost certainly will be my preferred OS on a Mac. In the meantime I'm testing PC-BSD 11.0-CURRENTNOV2015 and 11.0-CURRENTFEB2016.