ZFS support on macOS has been barely beta-quality for at least five years. I wish it were actually cross-platform, but it really only works well on Linux and FreeBSD.
Yes, and the article casually implies that ZFS totally works not only on Linux but also on OS X[1], which is... a stretch.
I check on it every year or so, but my impression is that ZFS on Mac is still so far behind where ZFS is on FreeBSD and (more recently) Linux, that it isn't really clear whether ZFS will ever work reasonably on the Mac.
(I would love to hear experiences of people actually using it on OS X, though! I may be out of date.)
That's too bad if so. ZFS is pretty cool technology (i've been pretty impressed with it so far for my personal use). I was really hoping it was going to be added at some point to OSX. Hopefully apple's in house implementation will fix a lot of the same issues ZFS was aiming at.
A friend of mine uses ZFS on OS X. Apparently it works quite well. I imagine Linux support is good too, but I'm not sure about Windows. At any rate, I'm surprised the author didn't mention it.
Apple had one point had read/write support for ZFS, but it was pulled because Sun at the time was not able to provide certain guarantees. There was an email by one of the main guys in ZFS that said something to that effect.
Ahh I didn't know that. Still a shame, I love ZFS (probably irrationally) but given it's license some of that goodness has to be reinvented in other projects which just seems unnecessary.
FWIW, ZFS has actually been available on macOS for a long time in various iterations (MacZFS, Z-410/ZEVO, and now OpenZFS [0]). I ran it for around 11 years on a number of systems with almost all of my data on it (home folder, applications, /opt for MacPorts etc) and it was a tank. Fun project and well worth checking out. I'll always regret the various factors that meant Apple didn't adopt it as their native FS.
Linux ZFS is still quite young, only supports a very early version of the fs, and can't be updated to the newest without serious reverse-engineering.
As for ZFS on windows, I definitely would not hold my breath.
I ran into the same frustration as the author and gave up. My notebook triple-boots Linux, Solaris 11, and OS X (I have no use for windows) and would be beyond thrilled to have ZFS shared among them.
One other problem with the idea though... you'd have to export the shared fs each time you shut down and import it into the next OS you booted, which would be kind of a pain (of course you could force the imports, but that's ugly and it only saves one step).
reply