ZFS (was Reliable Firewire drives)

[Brett Dikeman]

On Jan 10, 2008, at 11:50 PM, John Musbach wrote:
> > While the framework is there for zfs support in Leopard currently only
> > read only support exists at this time.

On Jan 11, 2008 4:34 AM, Dan Shoop <shoop at iwiring.net> wrote:

> Not true.

Leopard did not ship with write support for ZFS, and still does not
have it. Try it for yourself, if you insist on not believing what is
common knowledge (and, I can't help but add, easily "googled", as you
lambasted someone earlier.)

===

$dd if=/dev/zero of=./zfs.dmg bs=1000000 count=512
$ sudo zpool create ./zfs.dmg
Password:
ZFS Readonly implemntation is loaded!
To download the full ZFS read/write kext with all functionality
enabled, please go to http://developer.apple.com
Read-Only ZFS Implementation
unrecognized command 'create'

===

I STRONGLY urge extreme caution using ZFS.

ZFS is unstable, feature-incomplete, and slow in almost every port
that exists.  On FreeBSD, it's in the 7.0 (not stable) tree, and
requires significant usage-case-specific tweaking to keep from
crashing for several freebsd bleeding-edge users.  On its native 64
bit Solaris, Sun's response to most ZFS problems is, "buy more
memory", and Sun doesn't even recommend running ZFS on 32 bit Solaris
systems.

The 3rd-party port of ZFS to MacOS has a caveat list several bullet
points long, one of which is that you cannot remove a firewire or USB
device if it is part of a pool.

Running ZFS on any sort of production environment on anything except
64 bit Sun hardware w/Solaris means running on borrowed time, at least
for the moment.  That is clearly demonstrated with Apple's refusal to
release write support as anything but a developer preview.

The good news is that there are a lot of people excited about it, and
a lot of people coding, testing, porting.  Patience is a virtue.

By the way, Dan- please do something about the 17 lines of signature
in your posts. Common net-etiquette is 3-4 lines.

Brett