Losing ZFS

Luis Gerbarg has an interesting article with his thoughts about the reasons behind the absence of ZFS in 10.6 on his blog at http://devwhy.blogspot.com/2009/10/loss-of-zfs.html.

Here's hoping that he's right and Apple is already working on their own next generation filesystem - HFS+ is getting a bit long in the tooth, and it'd be nice to see an alternative in 10.7.

ZFS update for the bleeding edge

Saw a post on zfs-discuss today, ZFS for Leopard source & binaries have been posted to zfs.macosforge.org. This includes some new fixes over the one on ADC, but it is also bleeding edge - there's no PKG file to install, so you have to be comfortable manually copying a bunch of files at the command line with sudo to use this, and there are a bunch of known bugs (listed at zfs.macosforge.org).

It's not an official Apple release, so if you break anything on your system with it, I'm sure their response is going to be "reinstall everything - you did have backups, right?"

That said, Noël's announcement said that he has his homedir on ZFS now, which is what I've been wanting to do ever since I heard there might be ZFS support in 10.5.

Here's the list of bugs fixed in the 102A rev:

Bugs Fixed in this Rev:

• 5448925: sync ZFS with Solaris build 72


• 5405398: zfs needs kqueue(2) API support


• 5602507: Leopard9A581: Kernel trap at 0×4d351d9c, type 14=page fault, registers:


• 5592757: Kernel panic when writing to a zfs volume


• 5482932: Raidz parity rewrite issue


• 5641577: ZFS: panic: zap->zap_u.zap_fat.zap_phys->zap_magic == 0×2F52AB2ABULL failed


• 5621659: assertion failed in /Users/local/zfs-101-latest_fixes/zfs_kext/zfs/zfs_dir.c line 730: error == 0


• 5643944: ZFS get/set and mountpoints are misbehaving


• 5645880: Finder copy and “delete” broken in zfs-101 plus fixes..