4 ms·

I wonder, comparing with APFS do you miss it?

xoa 4y ago
I haven't given it up, I'm stubborn :). What I do now though at the desktop is have my user folder and data that I previously had on an internal or DAS ZFS fs instead live on an APFS formatted iSCSI LUN which in turn is a zvol on a NAS. So it's all still ZFS underneath, I still get all the data protection and ease of backups and so on, the performance is decent [0], but macOS thinks it is running perfectly native, and I don't need to worry at all about upgrades since the ZFS layer underneath is transparent. Well, at least not so long as I can still use iSCSI under macOS of course, right now that is still fine but if Apple kills the ability to run initiators down the road with no replacement option I'll be in trouble once again. I do miss some aspects anyway in terms of the ease of spinning up/cloning independent FS for projects, VMs etc and having them right there instantly, with their own snapshot policies and rollback chains. Obviously can still do that on a NAS and expose it but it's not at all as frictionless a process. I also miss not being able to do restores as easily, but Apple has steadily killed a lot of the convenience Macs had there and really wants you on the rails of their scheme, so it's better to just try to move as much custom stuff as possible outside the root fs entirely then overlay mount or point to different paths instead. I do still use it on my older MBP but I don't know how that'll survive transition to the AS era. Previously you could through some effort boot off it even, but my assumption is that will be utterly dead going forward so at most it'll be partitioning the internal drive. From my admittedly biased perspective APFS kind of sucks, it still sees data corruption, it's much harder to repair than HFS if something breaks since Apple doesn't bother to document or stabilize stuff anymore. I still think moving away from normalization was stupid. Overall though it is what it is, and it's Apple's native choice and it mostly doesn't get in the way. I know there's some clever stuff to do with CoreStorage as well and some people have played with using that along with ZFS but I have not. So yes, guess that turned into a very long way to say that I would indeed miss it if it ever comes to that. ---- 0: No issues saturating a 10G fiber link or 8g FC, and I've seen demoes hitting over 11GB/s (88 Gbps) on a Mac Pro 2019 with a higher end FC that I can't afford.
ggm 4y ago
I miss not being able to move disks from Apple to Linux and freebsd. That is, that's what I miss using APFS. No other aspect of APFS appeals to me over ZFS, except that Apple prefers it for time machine. That's why I use it. If Apple supported ZFS as a first class in-kernel fs type, I'd be delighted. I have already moved large zfs systems between FreeBSD and debian repeatedly. Snapshots are just ace! (by move I mean zfs export, move hard disks or re install OS and zfs import. zfs snap; zfs send | zfs recv is a different kind of "move" which I also do a lot)

xoa 4y ago

I haven't given it up, I'm stubborn :). What I do now though at the desktop is have my user folder and data that I previously had on an internal or DAS ZFS fs instead live on an APFS formatted iSCSI LUN which in turn is a zvol on a NAS. So it's all still ZFS underneath, I still get all the data protection and ease of backups and so on, the performance is decent [0], but macOS thinks it is running perfectly native, and I don't need to worry at all about upgrades since the ZFS layer underneath is transparent. Well, at least not so long as I can still use iSCSI under macOS of course, right now that is still fine but if Apple kills the ability to run initiators down the road with no replacement option I'll be in trouble once again. I do miss some aspects anyway in terms of the ease of spinning up/cloning independent FS for projects, VMs etc and having them right there instantly, with their own snapshot policies and rollback chains. Obviously can still do that on a NAS and expose it but it's not at all as frictionless a process. I also miss not being able to do restores as easily, but Apple has steadily killed a lot of the convenience Macs had there and really wants you on the rails of their scheme, so it's better to just try to move as much custom stuff as possible outside the root fs entirely then overlay mount or point to different paths instead. I do still use it on my older MBP but I don't know how that'll survive transition to the AS era. Previously you could through some effort boot off it even, but my assumption is that will be utterly dead going forward so at most it'll be partitioning the internal drive. From my admittedly biased perspective APFS kind of sucks, it still sees data corruption, it's much harder to repair than HFS if something breaks since Apple doesn't bother to document or stabilize stuff anymore. I still think moving away from normalization was stupid. Overall though it is what it is, and it's Apple's native choice and it mostly doesn't get in the way. I know there's some clever stuff to do with CoreStorage as well and some people have played with using that along with ZFS but I have not. So yes, guess that turned into a very long way to say that I would indeed miss it if it ever comes to that. ---- 0: No issues saturating a 10G fiber link or 8g FC, and I've seen demoes hitting over 11GB/s (88 Gbps) on a Mac Pro 2019 with a higher end FC that I can't afford.

ggm 4y ago

I miss not being able to move disks from Apple to Linux and freebsd. That is, that's what I miss using APFS. No other aspect of APFS appeals to me over ZFS, except that Apple prefers it for time machine. That's why I use it. If Apple supported ZFS as a first class in-kernel fs type, I'd be delighted. I have already moved large zfs systems between FreeBSD and debian repeatedly. Snapshots are just ace! (by move I mean zfs export, move hard disks or re install OS and zfs import. zfs snap; zfs send | zfs recv is a different kind of "move" which I also do a lot)