Who's who in Mac ZFS Land?

[Rob Lewis]

In the "You can't tell the players without a program" department: 

I'm an interested lurker and am confused about the relationships between all the various entities apparently involved in ZFS for Mac. 

Could someone please explain how they all fit together: 

MacZFS

OpenZFS for Mac

ZFS-OSX

ZEVO

others? 

With appreciation, 

--Rob Lewis

[ilov...@icloud.com]

http://bitly.com/osxzfs

That should answer your question.

[Bjoern Kahl]

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Hi Rob,

Am 23.02.14 04:02, schrieb Rob Lewis:

> In the "You can't tell the players without a program" department:
>
> I'm an interested lurker and am confused about the relationships
> between all the various entities apparently involved in ZFS for
> Mac.
>
> Could someone please explain how they all fit together:

There are a few implementations (see below) and different pool and FS
versions, supported by various releases of these implementations. For
an overview of pool and FS version, please see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Detailed_release_history

For the different implementations, read on:

>
> MacZFS

This is the stable branch.

It originates in the abandoned port from Apple also known as "10a286"
or "zfs-119" bits. Apple originally planned to include ZFS in Snow
Leopard Server but removed it (and any mention of the word ZFS) from
its website and the product shortly before release. Reasons
officially unknown.

MacZFS is meant for the everyday Mac user who wants a Mac like
solution without rough edge. Unfortunately we had a difficult time
with the Mavericks adaption, but that is solved now.

MacZFS' current release is MacZFS-74.3.3 and is maintained by me
(Björn aka BjoKaSH). It has a rather old pool and FS version (8 and 2)

It is expected to be phased-out sometime this year, when ZFS-OSX
reaches its first general public release.


> OpenZFS for Mac ZFS-OSX

These two are the same. ZFS-OSX is a new port to the Mac, independent
of Apples old code. It uses ZoL (ZFS on Linux) as its source and a
few bits from FreeBSD and the old MacZFS.

ZFS-OSX is the name of the principal source code repository and the
GitHub project hosting its source.

OpenZFS is a cross vendor / project initiative to unify the various
ZFS implementations from all supported platforms (illumos, *BSD,
Linux, Mac OSX, ...) and to coordinate new features and generally
promote ZFS. See http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Main_Page for details.

ZFS-OSX is part of of this initiative.

ZFS-OSX does not have installer releases meant for the general public
so far, but these are expected later this year. ZFS-OSX is maintained
by Lundman, who is the principal developer and did the vast majority
of work porting ZoL to Mac OSX.


Both MacZFS and ZFS-OSX are run by the same people and as such not
only cooperate but behind the scenes are a common effort to keep ZFS
on Mac OSX a reality.



> ZEVO

ZEVO is or was a new implementation of ZFS for Mac OX based of the SUN
and later illumos source code. ZEVO was developed by a company called
Tens Complement run by the former principal developer of ZFS at Apple.

ZEVO was a modern but closed-source implementation for Leopard and
Snow Leopard with an active (Beta-) User community disparate from the
MacZFS community.

ZEVO's development apparently stopped when TensComplement was bought by
Greenbytes. The current status and plans of ZEVO at Greenbytes is
unknown to me.


> others?

None I am aware of.


> With appreciation,

You are welcome. Guess we should update our Wiki to include a better
explanations of the various implementations.

@ Lundman: Feel free to comment on anything I missed, especially
regarding the state of ZFS-OSX.

@ Daniel: Maybe we should extend our FAQ or add an entire new page?



Best regards

Björn

- --
| Bjoern Kahl +++ Siegburg +++ Germany |
| "googlelogin@-my-domain-" +++ www.bjoern-kahl.de |
| Languages: German, English, Ancient Latin (a bit :-)) |
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[Jorgen Lundman]

> @ Lundman: Feel free to comment on anything I missed, especially 
>    regarding the state of ZFS-OSX. 

No, you answered it beautifully. We are actually on the cusp of the first package release. We are hoping that we have fixed the

cache issues we have experienced (infrequently). It is with the "testing department" now.

Lund

[David Cantrell]

On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 11:16:28PM -0800, ilov...@icloud.com wrote:

> http://bitly.com/osxzfs

That's helpful, thanks.

I've added a line for whether the various versions can have volumes be
managed via a GUI, although it's all just question marks as I don't
actually know the answers. I'd very much like to be able to manage
volumes and pools through Disk Utility.app.

--
David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

Wow, my first sigquoting! I feel so special now!
-- Dan Sugalski