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ZFS for Mac OS X is ready


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Sorry, I mean ZFS.

 

Does anyone have it?

 

I read that message and immediately rush over and installed it on my BadAxe2-based Hack (currently under efi8 & Kalyway 10.5.1). Works so far, i spend a whole 160 GB Disk for a zfs directory and copied a few files, etc. and back and forth. No problems. Next step ist to integrate 3 or 4 sata-drives to a RAID to see how performance and reliability works and to see how it interacts with different software.

 

My Personal Goal is to have a ZFS-Userspace, and (if possible/practicel) all programs running from zfs while starting from a fast raptor with my guid-based hfs-system (to have a working system until zfs is bootable and ready).

 

But maybe its a bit to early to set that much faith in the current zfs-implementation. Will see... :blink:

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  • 4 months later...

Ok guys, time to help me get this stuff work well.

 

I was searching informations about the chance to get OS X boot from ZFS. I know this feature is currently unsupported, but I thought it was worth trying. So this is what I thought.

 

The major problem with ZFS boot is that actually EFI doesn't know anything about ZFS, so it can't just boot because it can't see the partition. But what would happen if we boot from an HFS+ volume and then specify the ZFS boot partition with the famous "rd=diskxsy"?

Well, I found out it actually doesn't work, because ZFS doesn't work as usual filesystems. It does not use the form "diskxsy" to identify a partition, so if you try to force OS X to boot from that partition it will crash with kernelpanic telling you that "nfs is not yet initialized".

 

Now here you come. Have you got any idea about how could we manage to get this run - except wait for official support? :)

 

Sherry Haibara

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That's not the point. I actually have that kext, and I can read/write on ZFS volumes. My question is if we can somehow manage to get that ZFS volume boot OS X.

I found some interesting informations on the web about the possibility to use a "helper HFS+ partition" to load the kernel and the drivers, and then kick off the ZFS partition. Unfortunately, this infos are not very useful, since I don't know how to make OS X boot from a specific UUID.

 

Sherry Haibara

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Well, in mine some knownledgements, I think have to re-create "boot related files" (like a boot0 and some others), to it can find boot using this UUID: 6A898CC3-1DD2-11B2-99A6-080020736631

 

I don't know if it work, but, I believe in yes. :P

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Well, that's the generic UUID for a ZFS partition in a GPT disk. However, the idea is good, but actually the only boot file I found useful is boot.efi. Unfortunately, I opened it with an hex editor, and the only strings uuid-related I found are these:

 

Root MatchRoot UUIDnet-boot

root matching dictionary is:

%s

root-matchingallocate kernel nameboot-fileboot-device-pathboot-file-path

root device uuid is '%s'

boot-uuid(no root UUID found for boot device)

 

where I suppose %s stands for the UUID of the boot partition. I tried to change it with a custom UUID (ZFS), but actually it made the partition unbootable.

 

Moreover, we have two copies of boot.efi: one is stored in /usr/standalone/i386, the other one in /System/Library/CoreServices.

 

Sherry Haibara

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Well, that's the generic UUID for a ZFS partition in a GPT disk. However, the idea is good, but actually the only boot file I found useful is boot.efi. Unfortunately, I opened it with an hex editor, and the only strings uuid-related I found are these:

 

 

Root MatchRoot UUIDnet-boot

root matching dictionary is:

%s

root-matchingallocate kernel nameboot-fileboot-device-pathboot-file-path

root device uuid is '%s'

boot-uuid(no root UUID found for boot device)

 

where I suppose %s stands for the UUID of the boot partition. I tried to change it with a custom UUID (ZFS), but actually it made the partition unbootable.

 

Moreover, we have two copies of boot.efi: one is stored in /usr/standalone/i386, the other one in /System/Library/CoreServices.

 

Sherry Haibara

 

 

Wasnt showing up.

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