Share ZFS partition on OS X host with an xhyve Linux Guest

I have a shared ZFS partition between OS X and Ubuntu 16.04. However, sometimes, I must stay on OS X and use xhyve to run Linux guests.

When that happens, I want to mount my shared ZFS partition with my Linux guest. In my case, the Linux guest is a Scientific Linux 7.1 installation.

So how to go about doing this?

We begin by checking first if the sharenfs property is enabled on OS X:

zfs get sharenfs
NAME     PROPERTY  VALUE     SOURCE
data     sharenfs  on        local
data/aj  sharenfs  on        local

If not, you must run zfs set sharenfs=on ZPOOL_NAME (where ZPOOL_NAME is the name of the zpool you'd like to share over NFS, and then zfs share -a. I had to reboot OS X for changes to apply.

Still in OS X, you'll want to set /etc/exports to contain an entry like the one below:

# /etc/exports on OS X
/Volumes/data/aj -mapall=501 -network 192.168.64.0 -alldirs -mask 255.255.255.0

Then sudo nfsd restart to apply the changes.

In my example above, data is the zpool, and data/aj is the ZFS file system.

In the guest, you can then mount the NFS-shared ZFS file system with something like below:

sudo mount -o nolock -t nfs 192.168.64.1:/Volumes/data/aj/Developer/src ~/src