Known Issues and Features in the Works

Current Known Bugs We're Workin

• Currently, .zfs doesn’t work yet as we’re still in the process of porting it. All other snapshot capabilities work fine(rollback, send, recv), however you are unable to browse your snapshots individually via .zfs. You can use ‘zfs clone’ as a quick workaround to browse your snapshots:

  zfs clone tank/home@snap1 tank/mysnap
  

• If your pool is unreplicated(i.e. no raidz, or mirrors), you cannot hot unplug your devices that are members of your pool. This is true even if your devices are USB/Firewire devices. So before you yank your USB drive out of your machine, do a ‘zpool export ‘ first. Your life will be much happier.

• With zfs send/recv, currently doing a zfs send/recv using a pipe like::

   #zfs send tank/myhome@snap1 | zfs recv backup_tank/home
  

  will not work. However zfs send/recv works fine, just send the snapshot to a file first, and then use ‘zfs recv’ to receive from that file:

   #zfs send tank/myhome@snap1 > /tmp/snapshot1_file
   #zfs recv backup_tank/home < /tmp/snapshot1_file
  

• Renaming a zfs clone panics in dnode_sync.c on an assertion failure

• The trash does not empty on a ZFS volume. For now, you can workaround this by simply manually removing items from the .Trash directory

• Downloading music via iTunes onto a ZFS target volume requires you have iTunes 7.6 or later.

• Spotlight on ZFS volumes still have some issues we are working on. One is a Spotlight crash and another is that Spotlight will loop and continuously index your ZFS volume.

• Zvols are not supported and haven’t been ported

• Some options to some of the ZFS commands are unsupported as they utilize tools which don’t exist on Mac OSX. For example the zfs share command(there is no share command on Mac OSX), and some properties like the zoned and iscsioptions property (no zones or iscsi in OSX either) in the dataset, that just don’t make sense on a Mac OSX system. Zvols and their options are also all unsupported for now, but may become supported in the future if we find a need for them.
  

More generally, we’re also trying to shake out and fix bugs that occur with interactions between the rest of the system and ZFS. Since ZFS has a much different structure than HFS+ (pool based storage instead of device based) a lot of assumptions for tools and other parts of the system like Finder are no longer valid. Hence there’s still quite a bit of work that needs to be done to make us fit seamlessly with the rest of the system. Please let us know if you find any bugs/issues that need to be fixed here as well.

Please feel free to report bugs, make suggestions to us, and ask any questions you might have so far about ZFS via the zfs-discuss mailing list

Features in the Works

• Bootable ZFS
• Encrypted ZFS [ more info.. ]
• Gzip support
• Browsing .zfs snapshots