Large cats, ZFS and you

Like many, I got my copy of OSX 10.5 "Leopard" today to install on my MacBook. The upgrade went relatively smoothly and I was presented with the new UI in all it's flashy glory.

After doing the standard explorations: Coverflow in my images/ folder, new Mail.app. OSX supports ACL's now, that makes me pretty happy. Then, I decided to start playing with the OpenSolaris-derived features.

Dtrace. works like a charm. Colloquy spends an inordinate amount of time in syscall::read. A lot of Mac apps don't use syscall:::, that's interesting to note but not terribly surprising considering the way XNU is designed.

ZFS. Now, the version of ZFS that ships with OSX is read-only. My server, an Athlon64, and my workstation, a Blade1000 run SX:CE b74.

So, I pull out my USB stick, put it in the SPARC, and turn it in to a zpool named 'test'. export.
Put it in my MacBook.
$ sudo zfs import -a
The ZFS version is too new. OSX can't import it.

So I decide "what the hell..." and I log in to my ADC account, download the read/write beta of ZFS from Apple. Install it. Reboot. Put the USB stick in.
$ sudo zfs create newpool disk1
'newpool' shows up on my desktop. So far, so good.
$ sudo zfs create newpool/test
still good so far. I copy a small image over to the new pool, it does what you'd expect. So I unmount the volume. Won't unmount because it contains other volumes. that's silly, but okay... it's a beta and OSX doesn't really grok ZFS yet. Fire up Terminal.app again
$ sudo zpool export -f newpool
no dice, dataset busy. unmount it's mountpoint then. Try again. No feedback, it must've worked.
yank the USB key. The Mac gives me the multilingual kernel panic window ( it's not a blue screen, that means it's better than Windows, right? ). Whatever.
I plug the key in to my Blade1k and run a
# zpool import -a
I/O error reading dataset 'test'. Kernel Panic. That's interesting... shouldn't the old dataset been destroyed when the new dataset took the device over?

So, I bring it back over to the Mac and run disk util, maybe I can just destroy the EFI partition table and try again from scratch. Disk util somehow mounts 'test' to my desktop and sits there spinning forever. I can't unmount test at all because it's in use. Force Quit Disk Utility. Nothing. kill -9 it. Nothing.
$ sudo umount -f /Volumes/test
could not unmount. yank the drive. kernel panic.

At about this point I decide that my best course of action with respect to this USB key is to find a machine that doesn't support ZFS and format it there, and give up trying to coax OSX to behave like Solaris.

Casualties: one USB key.
Conclusion: When Apple says "beta", they mean it.