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Jorgen Lundman edited this page Apr 19, 2026 · 3 revisions

Getting Involved

Getting involved and contributing benefits not only the community and your fellow users, but the wider free and open source software ecosystem as well.

This page describes some of the ways both new and experienced users can contribute to the OpenZFS on OS X community. It is not an exhaustive list.

Official OpenZFS on OS X Projects

GitHub

The project is now centered on GitHub, including issues, discussions, and the wiki.

  • Issues: report bugs, request features, and track development
  • Discussions: ask questions, share ideas, and talk with the community
  • Wiki: improve documentation and platform-specific guides

Improve the Wiki

The wiki is community-maintained documentation. Contributions are always welcome.

Chat With the Community

You can help other users solve problems and discuss development in the project chat channels.

Fix and Report Bugs

Reporting and fixing bugs on GitHub is one of the most helpful ways to contribute.

When reporting problems, please include enough context to make the issue easier to reproduce, diagnose, and resolve. At a minimum, it helps to include:

  • what you were doing
  • whether the issue is repeatable
  • the full text of any stack dump
  • your macOS version
  • your OpenZFS on OS X version

If you are experiencing kernel panics, enable keepsyms first. This makes stack traces human-readable and greatly improves the chances of diagnosing the problem.

If the system deadlocks, run spindump after the deadlock starts and before the machine becomes unusable. There is often only a narrow window to do this. spindump must be run with elevated privileges, usually via sudo.

sudo spindump
Password:
Sampling all processes for 10 seconds with 10 milliseconds of run time between samples
Sampling completed, processing symbols...
Spindump analysis written to file /tmp/spindump.txt

Copy the output file to an HFS filesystem and reboot.

For real-time help, check the project chat or GitHub Discussions.

Code

Developers of all experience levels are welcome to contribute. If you would like to help with development, join the conversation in the project chat channels or on GitHub. Create your first PR today!

Clone this wiki locally