[MacZFS-devel] State of osx.zfs Dec 2013

[Jorgen Lundman]

Hello everyone,


Just to give a quick run down of what *I* think is the current state of the
osx.zfs port. :)

I had a chance to attend the ZFS Day held in San Francisco, and meet a lot
of talented people. I have already cashed in on that by asking weird
questions, sometimes even related to ZFS. One of the items discussed at
ZFS.Day is the new testing-framework, which we hope to bring to OSX as well.

As for our own ZFS port, we are currently at a mid-Oct sync with ZOL-0.6.3
and it is running stable. We are awaiting ZOL to tag 0.6.3 properly for a
final sync with them, but I believe that has been delayed for a little bit.


There are a few areas which we are attempting to solve.

* kernel memory

We have set the ARC somewhat conservatively in the OSX port. It should not
panic when it runs out of memory, and should be stable. But it is far from
the fastest solution. Nor is it good at using more memory for the large
memory systems. This is an ongoing part of the project which I am sure we
will revisit many times.


* spotlight

Currently we do to please the mds tools and Spotlight enough to work as
expected. The final piece here is most likely that diskutil/DA should issue
the mount request, and not mount(2).


* Disk Arbitration

The ZEVO approach here appears to be creating "dummy" /dev/nodes for each
mountpoint, so that DA will see the new disk, and partition table, and call
the correct mount utility to mount it. We will most likely do a similar
approach to trigger DA, and this should also fix the spotlight issue above.


* Installer

I believe there is already an Installer for the new version going through
internal testing, and could be released any time soon.


Since it appears that this port is "doable" and probably "worth doing" (now
that it works), we should probably discuss where it should go in future.
What is the general feeling towards renaming it, as a newer version of the
existing maczfs, and hosting it on maczfs.org .. or

.. should we keep it strictly separated, under a new name? Those who have
legacy powers should probably voice their opinions too.


The code commits have moved from daily-multiples in August, to a-few-a-week
in December, and we have switched development style to encourage stability
due to increasing number of users. The 'master' branch remains the bleeding
edge though :)


Lund

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