According to Lundman earlier today [1] O3X ("OpenZFS For OS X") never fully made the transition from basing off of ZoL to illumos. So this won't really make a major practical difference for the Mac, O3X will just move fully back to basing off of ZoL and that'll be that. In terms of core feature set it's already doing pretty well, and has developed far farther then ZEVO ever could. If anything this might be good inasmuch as it'll mean ZoL specifically is getting another set of eyes towards maintaining portability, so perhaps long term both FreeBSD and O3X may benefit from a lot of extra eyes on it and a bigger userbase while not falling to too much Linux-specific behavior.
I mean, there's unlikely to be any official support of zfs on Mac and the fact Apple developed apfs recently could mean there's less appetite for community to port and support zfs on Mac.
>could mean there's less appetite for community to port and support zfs on Mac.
Eh? The community port and support already happened, years ago. I made the move myself from ZEVO once Spotlight support got mainlined but even that was a while ago and it already had a ton of great features before that. It is a small scale effort compared to Linux or FreeBSD of course, but it has kept up pretty darn well and is pretty solidly developed at this point. I push it pretty hard on my Macs and it's been pretty reliable, though there are definitely edge case oddities that can be found. You can also see the smaller scale of the effort in areas like the wiki not being fully up to date, or that booting off of it still is rough. Even so it's pretty solid at this point and hits all the core features including encryption.
Long term the big risk of course is that Apple will shut off all user low level access to their drives via T-series chips in Macs, since they don't actually give hardware owners the ability to use their own keys there. Ideally this would be illegal but I doubt any movement will be made on that in the US at least in the near future. Even so given that Apple up until recent has still been selling brand new Macs without it macOS itself will likely support running on those systems for a long time to come (Apple still officially supports running the existing version even on 8 year old MPs, granted with compromises but those had pretty fundamental divergences from modern firmware too). O3X is still pretty nice in the mean time.
I’m not terribly afraid of Apple doing that move. With Core Storage, Apple already has abstracted away low level storage access years ago. Even if Core Storage was mandatory (which it isn’t), O3X runs perfectly fine on top of Core Storage either with or without ZFS encryption. O3X will continue to run happily as long as block-level storage access remains built into macOS. And it will because APFS is a very young filesystem, which depends on block-level access; it took Apple a decade to build APFS from scratch so there’s no way for Apple to get rid of this dependency without throwing APFS away and starting from scratch.
But what if Apple simply built APFS into one of the next generations of T-series chips so it can physically deny block-level access to software? Not going to happen: Apple needs APFS to work not only with built-in storage but also with external USB drives, RAM disks, DMGs, sparse bundles, and so on. This means APFS needs to remain in kernel space, and kernel code will continue to have block-level access, and so will O3X and all of its features.
I don't see how. Those who want ZFS probably want to use specific features of it or for specific purposes but don't want to have to stop using macOS to continue working with ZFS volumes.
