id summary reporter owner description type status priority milestone component version resolution keywords cc port 51246 submission: port:zfs and port:zfs-devel RJVB macports-tickets@… "I've finally gotten around to making a port for the OS X implementation of the ZFS filesystem, now that it seems to have reached a sufficient maturity (read: it no longer causes system instability after having done a few simple tests). I don't think I have to introduce ZFS here, but for those who really don't know what it is: It's the filesystem that Apple once considered as an officially supported FS, if not the default for OS X. It provides very high data reliability (*), is extremely flexible & scalable and has a potential for very good performance (though not necessarily trivial and probably not yet in the OS X implementation). It also offers optional on-the-fly compression including using the lz4 scheme which is fast enough to improve I/O to slow media (time spent de/compressing is less than the increase in data transfer times). *) even when using a single partition because it can write each file in multiple copies - a feature that prevented me from losing no more than a single trivial file from my Linux rig when a disk started dropping sectors on me at a rate I never saw before a few days ago. I already tested an earlier release from an officialy installer on Bradley's (pixilla) VM about a year ago, using it to put a whole MacPorts install in a dataset mounted on /opt/local, with compression, case sensitivity and redundancy for important parts like the registry. The current implementation installs everything properly into ${prefix}, kernel extensions included. That works fine on OS X 10.9 (with a single warning when loading eacho of the kexts the 1st time). I'd be very interested in feedback from users on more recent versions of OS X, notably 10.11 . I suspect it might be necessary to put the kernel stuff into /Library when SIP is not disabled (?) Notes: - ZFS does tend to like having sufficient memory. On systems with <8Gb it might be wise to read up on reducing the max. amount used by ARC (not related to ObjC's ARC ;)) - This is a project that's seeing active development and continuous improvement. There's a `port:zfs` but I would strongly suggest to test `port:zfs-devel`. - In fact, I'd (almost) suggest to use an official installer from the project's website instead of using `port:zfs`, because that should give better system integration ""out of the box"". On the other hand, the MacPorts version should be less intrusive/invasive and easier to uninstall. WARNING: This port installs kernel extensions which get loaded automatically when using ZFS. As a result it should PROBABLY NOT be deactivated, uninstalled or reinstalled without taking the following precautions: 1) unmount (export) all ZFS datasets and pools 2) kextunload zfs.kext 3) kextunload spl.kext Question: is there a phase where one could check if either of the kexts is loaded, and raise an error if that is the case (pre-deactivate would be perfect)? " submission closed Normal ports wontfix