distribution-macOS VS zfs

Every Christmas break I always hope I'll have the emotional energy to dig back into https://github.com/PureDarwin/PureDarwin#readme and see if I can get it to boot, even on VirtualBox, let alone some hackintosh friendly hardware like OP did

I am super, super cognizant that the devil's in the proverbial details, but they sure do seem to publish a lot of macOS into the open <https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...> so my interest is to map out the parts that are missing

I'm also aware that Darling exists (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38423469 ) but if it's anything like Wine -- no, thank you. The only reason Wine (and their CrossOver friends) are required to exist is because there's no suitable open source release of Windows, so emulating the bugs is glucose cheaper. I had high hopes for ReactOS when I was in college, but I think they're just pushing that rock uphill (although I am super glad the project exists)

Having said all of that, don't overlook that even if I snapped my fingers and had a PureDarwin built 14.3 .iso this very second, the supply chain for x86_64 applications for any such OS is likely going the way of the dodo, since it won't be in a vendor's best interest to dedicate resources to building releases for what they assume is a dead platform

To be fair, linking to the Releases page when there are no release notes are all here was completely useless for browsing. Linking directly to the tag on the Git repo would make it obvious that submodules are being used and allows browsing directly:

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...

I doubt most readers on HN are going to clone this locally and I also doubt anyone expects a release archive to contain Git submodules. This isn't to fault the repo authors, since we have to note that there isn't an actual "GitHub Release" here, it's just the automatic archive from GitHub for a certain tag.

Vendors have been selling you open-source software since the '80s. Here's macOS 13.2's open-source components. Darwin isn't really a thing any more, but around half of what Apple doesn't distribute any more is open source as well.

Darwin is open source. Here's the repo for their kernel: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/tree/main. The userspace stuff can be found here: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...

Be careful if you use ZFS-on-root, make sure not to snapshot bpool or it will brick your system and require a complete reinstall.

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/13873

> The only non-junk PCIe3 option that's even advertised here recently is the overpriced WD Red SN700.

Those WD drives seem to have some real issues, at least with ZFS and btrfs. :(

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793

IMO the "next fs" is just zfs. They somewhat recently merged RAIDZ expansion feature https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/12225 and make regular improvements. If no file system has what you need today, zfs will probably be the first one to have it "tomorrow," imo.

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/15526#issuecomment-181...

> zpool get all tank | grep bclone

> kc3000 bcloneused 442M

> kc3000 bclonesaved 1.42G

> kc3000 bcloneratio 4.30x

> My understanding is this: If the result is 0 for both bcloneused and bclonesaved then it's safe to say that you don't have silent corruption.

A couple years ago, I had an idea for convincing a filesystem to go faster using 2 compression steps instead of one. I couldn't see why it wouldn't work, and I also couldn't convince myself it should.

It seems to have worked out. [1]

[1] - https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/commit/f375b23c026aec00cc9527...

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/7631

This is a long-standing issue with zvols which affects overall system stability, and has no real solution as of yet.