I never thought Fusion would kernel panic!

[slgarwood]

I was installing Ubuntu Server (ARM) getting ready to install the Desktop component. Other stuff going on at the same time - ZFS copy, Safari. 

The whole system took a dive - rebooted and everything. I suspect it was the somewhat sketchy port of ZFS to ARM.

Anyone else had the whole system crash while heavily loaded?

M2 Max, 32 GB,1 TB with Sony TV attached via MIDI for alternate console.

No cream info in system that I can find.

 

[slgarwood]

Should say dump info not found.

[Technogeezer]

I would agree with you on the ZFS port. Fusion doesn't use kernel extensions. A macOS bug or fault in the ZFS on macOS are IMO the likely candidates for the kernel panic. I personally would suspect the latter, as macOS kernel panics are rare.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Alternate file systems (e.g. NTFS) have never played well with MacOS, so that's highly likely.

[slgarwood]

Yup - the ZFS build for Ventura is a bit 'iffy' - a user supplied build.

I have a couple of TB of data to move to Ventura (on the round spinning rust things) which sort of leaves APFS out - its a horrible choice for HDD drives. Most of the data is under EXT4 on a Linux system that is getting long in the tooth. This is the motivation for me to get Fusion up on Ventura - I'll then copy all the EXT4 data to something else - on Linux or FreeBSD the obvious choice is ZFS as an archival file system. HFS+ is not a good archival system as it is missing alll the checksumming and mirroring features of a modern FS.

Add in the extra features of APFS (builtin Volume manager) and the fact that encrypted HFS+ drive creation is no more I guess future proofing (APFS) is better.

Things that could have been ... Snow Leopard (a real server system), ZFS (until Apple couldn't swallow the Oracle license terms), NTFS support for real. The rack mounted Xserves .. etc etc

Apple now makes more profit from iPhone that the total profit in the PC and Mac world put together.

See :

Apple no longer needs creative types. The profit from selling just the iPhone is about the same as the entire PC industry (Mac and Windows) combined, both (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-facing-heat-declining-iphone-021855780.html)
 at
about (http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3320517)
 $120 billion / year.

 

[ColoradoMarmot]

I hear you on APFS, from a performance standpoint it completely sucks (I made the mistake of formatting a couple of my drives that way, and it takes 24-48 hours to copy 8TB vs 6-8 on HPFS+.    Once it's there though, it works well.  You can do HPFS+ encrypted from terminal, or after formatting you can right click and choose encrypt from finder.  Beyond belief that Apple took that out of disk utility though, because it should still be the default on spinning disks.  Talk about 'inside cupertino' thinking - not everything is on SSD or the cloud.

As for HPFS+ though, trust it FAR more than any third party file system - even the commercial ones are problematic at best (and often corrupt data).  The NTFS file system blew up more times than I can count.  No way would I trust a bolt-on FS for archival data

But honestly, as cheap as drives are, I just do two HPFS+ drives where I want local redundancy, and backblaze for the other stuff.   

[Technogeezer]

Agreed that APFS is not a good choice for HDDs, except in very limited circumstances. If you have any kind of active writing going on with an APFS file system on HDDs, that's where the performance really gets bad. Using it for "archival" or backup purposes (e.g. Time Machine) seems to work OK.

Yes ZFS is a nicely done file system. But I'm not one of those that thinks it's a panacea and I don't disagree with Apple for not dealing with Oracle (If you think Apple is bad, Oracle is 10x worse). ZFS gets its performance by use of caches - both in memory and by using high performance cache disks. MacOS users complain now about memory utilization, can you imagine if they found that there's no free memory??

And ZFS's ability to recovering from a block corrupted due to "bit rot") requires essential a mirror copy of the data. 

So please bear with me if I think that ZFS works well for a server-based operating system like Solaris, but not so great for a desktop system.

I do believe that AppleRAID is still available in Disk Utility and through diskutil.

[slgarwood]

Maybe I'll give Apple RAID a try .. I'll let you know how it works out.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Yup, I use AppleRAID via disk utility (and you can encrypt it).  It only supports HPFS+ interestingly, so I hope it's not headed for depreciation, because SoftRAID is just a big bag of hurt.

[gringley]

I use APFS with Apple RAID.  I have a pair of Envoy Pro EX drives in an Apple RAID 0 with APFS and it performs around 1800 MB/s in benchmarks.  I also did a pair of 8TB WD disks this way and it has worked well for me for the last 3 years.  I recall looking at SoftRAID.  It did not work with whatever MacOS was new at that time, and it looked like it was going to be nothing but trouble over the years.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Argh, major error there, it only works with apfs - I wanted to use it with HPFS and couldn't.  Must be getting old

Yeah, softraid usually lags in support for new OS's, and it's a major problem if you upgrade the OS when it's not supported - like boot into recovery mode to disable it level problem.

This is why I'm a fan of hardware raid whenever possible.