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Are there any beginner resources for learning about file systems? Would be smart / harmful to reformat my whole macbook ssd to ZFS?

• pmarreck 10y ago
  I don't think you can use ZFS as a boot volume on Macs (and only on Linux with caveats).
  • ryao 10y ago
    XNU hard codes HFS+ as the rootfs, but people have managed to make Mac OS X boot using a ZFS zvols to store a HFS+ rootfs. Unfortunately, there are no guides for that at this time.
  • cmurf 10y ago
    The limiting factor is the bootloader. Mac firmware can read HFS+ natively, find the bootloader, which in turn recognizes HFSX, Apple RAID, and Apple Core Storage. I doubt any of the previous ZFS support exists in the current bootloader. Unlike linux where there's a separate /boot, OS X doesn't really separate boot from root file systems. So how you'd boot XNU from HFS+ and transition to a separate ZFS root fs isn't obvious to me from the existing documentation.