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Mac OS X to Get Journaling FS
overunderunderdone writes "According to eWeek, Apple Computer is planning to introduce a new journaling file system code-named 'Elvis' with the 10.2.2 release. Supposedly it will run on top of HFS+ and will be turned off by default. Though it will cost you 10% to 15% performance penalty the article says it is more extensive than NTFS and is on par with BeOS's 64-bit journaling file system. Not surprising since it is being developed by the same person - Dominic Giampaolo." I've been super impressed by OS X having used it as my primary laptop for the last couple weeks. It really is a great unix box- and this is one of the important missing puzzle pieces.
...when you pry HFS+ from my cold, dead hands.
No, wait. Give me that.
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
Seems like lately Apple has been hellbent on increasing performance and reintegrating features from 9. Not that I'm complaining, 10.2.1 runs like a dream on my TiBook. Glad to see things moving forward.
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jonathan barket
Is this an entirely new journaling system or one based on an existing (BeOS) journaling system? Won't there be performance and stability impacts from basing it on HFS+ instead of a more modern framework? Is is possible to compile one of the existing *BSD journaling systems on OSX/Darwin (I haven't heard of anyone with success in this matter)?
what other important features has OSX that Linux has not. I am thinking about getting a Laptop with OSX so I was wondering how OXS compares to Linux.
Though it will cost you 10% to 15% performance penalty
:(
this could be a problem, seeing as macs have been seriously underperforming compared to PC's lately already. OS X tends to need a fast g4 just to run properly anyway, I guesse this file system will just push the requirements for OS X even higher
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
I love OSX, woudl kill for an apple, but...
given how sluggish the OS is now, i wonder what it it would be like with a 10-15% hit...
what woudl i use jouranlised fs for anyway?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
How does him saying he's impressed with OS X translate into that?
Ok, so being I'm not the highest on there terminology totem pole, can somebody expain to me why journaling matters to me, and why its worth 10-15% of my system resources?
Mod point free since 2001
...to Switch! This was about the last major gripe I had with Mac OS X. We already have an encrypted file system. However, no matter how I have abused my Macs in the past, I have never had filesystem corruption with HFS+. I constantly forget to unmount my iPod and yank it off the firewire cable. Mac OS X grips about the possibility of filesystem corruption but so far, so good. Others mileage may vary and I wouldn't do it during a write.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
i wish it would have been explained that way...
the writer of the eWeek article is Nick De Plumme (or something) - he's the guy from ThinkSecret....
hardly a "journalistic" website.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
I wonder if that stated 10-15% performance hit
is with or without journal on a separate disk.
I'm surprised no one has brought this up yet.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
At least this shows Apple's serious with courting the tech-savvy audience. Before, the reason to go with Apple was out of preference for the UI... and that was it. OS9 was ungainly and unstable. With OSX there're now true geeky reasons to want a Mac. No more being ashamed of coveting the rainbow apple! I want protected memory/journalling fs/unix multiuser/process stability/gnu tools/etc ... and an interface that looks like i can eat it for dessert!
One of the main reasons I haven't switched from the despotic Linux family with it's Nazi-esque SysV init scripts is the presence of awesome journaling capability, knowing that I can pull out the power cords on my SCSI disks and reconstruct data on the fly gives me a lot of peace of mind.
But, having cut my eye teeth on SunOS 4.1.3, I still have a hankering for the old rc files, and the general Berkeleyness of the BSDs. Will Apple be good enough to help roll a decent journaling file system back into the BDSs, so I can return to my blissfil Berkely rc days, and not worry about the cleaning lady pulling out my RAID power outlet to use the vacuum cleaner?
Since plenty of people hate that, I don't see that being a default. Ever.
Would be nice to have the option though.
Mod point free since 2001
I trust the speed hit is for FS operations.
:-)
And the second question is why it's off by default
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Meet your new boss, same as the old boss.
for all the users crying OSX rulez, dont forget the Freedom in GNU/Linux has a purpose - to avoid being owned by MS or Apple or Sun or many others who would enslave your computing lives.
remember that when you think about OSX.
I'd rather have a plain old UFS filesystem that IS case sensitive than HFS+journaling+whatever.
Actually, I'd like to see XFS on mac. I guess it's one thing to take ideas from *BSD, but completely different from taking ideas from IRIX.
Doesn't the Apple_UFS have SoftUpdates compiled in? Doesn't ordered writes of metadata preserve filesystem integrity better, faster, and with less performance hit than journaling (which ideally requires its own platter?) Doesn't Apple already have this?
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
do you get an "Elvis has left the building" message?
A new and cool feature would be a file system that maintained a Weblog...
Today I stored my user's tax return...what a piece of crap...he actually expects the IRS to believe that he donated 40,000 to the MDA?...I think I'll just switch a few numbers around and drop a hint to the audit hotline
Yeah, that could be good...where's the SourceForge project for this?
Will this do?
it's in Beta 5 - has Focus Follows Mouse, also has multiple desktops (the only one that "really" works on OS X)
g z
CodeTek is extremely responsive, and VirtualDesktop will be a musthave app when it is finished.
product info: http://www.codetek.com/php/virtual.php
direct d/l (full featured but limited to 2 virtual desktops) http://www.codetek.com/CodeTekVirtualDesktop.dmg.
I use FAT32.
The diskspace used by the journal file in NTFS and this new filesystem can be put to much better use.
Ya, like all of the fucking backups you need to keep your data safe. On that 80Gig disk, no less.
Fuck
All
There
is what we used to call the FAT filesystem, and for good reason. No security, no recovery. You work for Peter Norton, any chance?
Get a clue, bud - journaling file systems were integrated with _all_ modern OSes for a reason. Namely, big gain, near zero cost.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Rob, what kind of laptop is it?
And will you be writing a review of OSX and Apple laptops in the near future?
"The diskspace used by the journal file in NTFS and this new filesystem can be put to much better use."
You mean like empty cluster tips?
NTFS might use a good amount of space, but you make up for allot of that just based on the smaller cluster sizes. Take a large directory (20,000+ files, 10GB+), put it on a Win2k machine with NTFS, then another with FAT32. Right click -> properties. Size on Disk says it all.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
If it takes a 10-15% performace hit that is significant on older hardware. 10.2 is faster than 10.1 but on a G3 333 it's still dog slow. It works out my G4 733 too.
That being said I'll try it but hopefully there will be a way to disable it as well.
I really like the letter 'z'
Apple is a lot of things, and Microsoft isn't one of them.
DARWIN IS OPEN-SOURCE
OS X gives such an Incredible amount of freedom. It can run any app, IN AQUA (with rootless XDarwin), with a simple recompile. With fink, no recompile needed.
I doubt if you've seriously used OS X
Note that Windows' core will never be open source if we all live to be 3000 years old.
Disk Read Failure: The King is dead.
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jonathan barket
This refers to hard disk access time penalties, not an overall 10-15% reduction in the performance of your computer.
When I bought my Acer notebook computer in 1999, I could afford only 64 MB of RAM. I have since upgraded it to 128 MB. A 10-15% reduction in swap file throughput will noticeably decrease the performance of my computer, especially with the slow 3600 RPM drives they put in laptops to keep the power drain down.
Will I retire or break 10K?
So why isn't apple distributing ISOs for me to trashout OS X and install a real/complete open source OS?
As a few people have pointed out, that's drive performance. I don't think alot of people will suffer from this. I am kind of paranoid however with my older TiBook because of the slower drive. As is, my external firewire drive rapes the internal one speed wise. Be interesting to see though.
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jonathan barket
are you serious? Can anyone confirm this?
By default, Red Hat Linux since at least 7.3 has formatted Linux partitions in "ext3fs", a journaling version of the ext2fs format common on Linux systems.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm not saying that Apple is a great company and deserves unwarranted praise from the /. crowd, but just because Apple is in it for profit does not mean Apple is, or ever will be as bad as Microsoft.
Just let me know when you find a 5,000$ laptop and we'll find out, heh :D
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jonathan barket
Yes. I'm running a 17" iMac (That is: a single G4 at 800mHz) with 768MB RAM and it's plenty snappy. I DO wish for a faster processor when rendering video, but system performance and app performance is generally great.
10.2 is also generally acceptable even on my old Wallstreet, upgraded to 500mHz running just 192 MB of RAM! I like XP OK, but can you run it on a laptop you bought in 1998?
Yes, I am very cheap, but I don't need a ton of processing power for most stuff I do.
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
Oh well. I don't run OS 10.2 on my G3-333 I just tried it on that before installing on my G4-733 to test it (since I'm new to macs). I also wanted to see if it could live up to the hype on older hardware. I knew if it would run well on a G3-333 it would scream on my G4-733. That being said I run OS 9.2.2 on it and it's faster than hell (10.2 was creeper slow).
I also missed the part about HD performance, however my G3 has SCSI hard drives so I bet it wouldn't hurt that much. Now on IDE it's probably a whole different story.
Dominic Giampaolo does work for apple, and is working on such a file system... so, this has been expected. but, as a mac person with limited experience, what are the advantages of a journaling file system? my understanding is that it prevents data loss upon crashing, and is very useful in database applications. but, will backup software need to be completely rewritten to take advantage of this feature? in terms of speed, it looks like the only way the os will become truly speedy is with major processor improvements--gpul. i booted into os9 yesterday, and found that the os was really snappy on my tibook 400. i generally run 10.2.1. there is a thread running at powerpage.org discussing the lack of speed.
If this were a statement about just about anything besides GNU/Linux, it would be modded (accurately) as offtopic. Think about if something similar were said about Apple in a Linux thread.
This article is about journaling on Mac OS X. Some people are saying the journaling is another good thing about Mac OS X, but they are still talking about the subject at hand.
The parent comment, telling everyone that GNU/Linux is good because it is not Apple or MS is just plain off the subject. Not to mention that it has loaded phrases like "Apple == Microsoft" and "enslave your computing lives"-- the commenter of course says nothing to support his claims.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
I won't touch OSX until it implements click to focus.
Oh wait, it already does! Swe-e-e-e-et!
Oops, they have!
Well, we all know Apple's just "embracing and extending", they don't ever submit any of their extensions to the IETF and release that code, right?
wrong, and wrong again!
It is about as close as you can get. Its like saying linux is not unix. Fine its a unix clone.
Just grab yourself a copy of CodeTek Virtual Desktop for OSX: it provides an option for focus-follows-mouse.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
For the n'th time, OS X != UNIX!!! No, you are talking about Linux. Do you also believe none of the BSD's are UNIX, since they started as extensions to UNIX?
Won't ever happen... That sort of option would be a threat to the 'consistancy' of OSX feel. On top of that, that functionality is against the most fundamental principles of UI design. In apple thought, moving the mouse means the cursor moves without in any way having the UI take action. If a UI action is required, a mouse press is required. Personally, I use sloppy focus where possible, but to most people it doesn't make sense that something like window focus can be changed without a click, and it annoys them. If they move the mouse out of the way and a background app grabs focus, they get frustrated...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
There are 20 differnt GUI front ends to turning this thing on? And of course a couple of people will make such an application shareware.
I'm sure some people out there realize this, but I wanted to point it out: having a journaling file system isn't meant for the typical user who has their laptop to check email & surf the web. Duh! No one using a graphical interface would want to sacrifice 15% of eye-candy processing power just to have a more reliable file system.
This change is meant for people who are using OS X on *servers*... possibly even (gasp!) headless servers! I'm currently running a webserver & IMAP mail server off of an OS X box, and I never actually pull up the GUI on it (why would I need to?). But I'd love to have the added assurance of JFS on it. This is the market that Elvis is meant for.
Apple is trying to edge their way into the low-end server market, which is already over-crowded. Putting this feature into their OS, even though it's turned off by default, is a big feature difference for the XServe-purchasing crowd.
So, unless you're really nervous about losing your porn, your desktop machine doesn't need this.
--Mid
A huge fraction of technical (and high-spending) PC users who might switch know exactly what Slashdot is.
It would be awesome: "... I'm Rob Malda, and I run Slashdot.org"
another good reason to buy a mac. what are you people trying to do, make me go into debt!!!???
They've already got Jordan H of FreeBSD fame working on the guts of the thing, why not use Kirk Mccusick's soft updates on top of their ufs implimentation?
In it's current implimentation it vastly outperforms journaling filesystems and has great data integrity.
Sitting Walrus Blog
Your swap file doesn't need to be journalled.
Spyky
It's not 10-15% of over all performance, but 10-15% performance when data is written to disk. For other operations, the journaling file system doesn't do anything, and doesn't influence performance.
:)
Or at least that's what logic would seem to dictate. I don't actually know anything about journaling file systems
Do I see an Apple "switcher" ad featuring CmdrTaco in the near future?
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
Hooray for you! Yay for NTFS!
I love you man.....
Yay for you too! I glad that your convictions are rock solid! No need to apologize that you want focus follows mouse. ( Notice "want" as opposed to "need", but that is another story...) You rock! I love you...
Unless Apple is caching its graphics to disc before displaying them, it wouldn't make a different in your "eye-candy processing power".
Thats a 15% hit in disk performance, not system performance.
In the last six months, OS X has somehow emerged as the main competitor for desktop/laptop Linux. It's sad, really, to see people who have espoused the benefits of Free Software for years turn around in the blink of an eye and show up with a Ti Book. Don't get me wrong, OS X is some pretty hot shit right now. The problem is that it is hot *proprietary* shit. Yeah, yeah, Darwin. Whatever. Don't be a fool.
To me, the last great hope is Red Hat. Did Red Hat release their excellent 8.0 too late? No. There is still hope left. 8.1 will hopefully fold in the multimedia bits and polish thing up a bit. The war isn't over yet...
A week with a Mac laptop, running OS X?
We are all doomed! Once you go Mac, you never go back!
Next he'll be dressing up in black, sporting a goatee, and drinking pretentious coffee drinks...
Like him!
GPL Deconstructed
Slugish?? Wha? Wha? Have you tried 10.2 It works much better for on my even my old iBook. It was WAY, WAY faster then say KDE is on my laptop
What I want is a filesystem that supports 1)Long File Names 2)Large Files (over 4GB) 3)Journaling and 4) can be used between Linux, Mac OS X and whatever else. Unfortuantely there are currently no filesystems that mett all of these criteria. The closest one unfortunately is FAT32, only even it falls way short. Until then it is very difficult for me to share my firewire drive between multiple platforms. -peel
just my carrot for the button soup.
A journaling filesystem does not "provide corporate Mac sites with a new, historical view of their data"; all it does is increase reliability.
What do you need a case sensitive FS for? I've honestly never come across a need to have a "random.file" and a "RANDOM.file" ever. Why do you need case sensitvity?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
On servers, despite its popularity, journaling makes much less sense: there are better ways to recover from failures, and the performance hit really does matter.
So Windows has FAT32 and all we've got is old Fat Elvis.
1. Use Slackware. BSD-style init scripts, very nice and simple, definately not written by Nazi's ;-)
2. Roll your own. They're just simple scripts fer chrissakes!
Besides, SysV init scripts aren't in any way difficult, I can't imaging someone wanting to use a different OS on account of the init scripts!
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I found this howto through google. It shows you step by step how to set up OSX to use a different partition for swaping. I've never used it myself so I can't comment either way.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
Actually, the reason I bought my iBook was, at the time, Compaq and Apple were the only major U.S. suppliers offering the CD-RW/DVD combo drive on a notebook. Also, I didn't trust Micrososft with my media files and I needed good Unicode support for Japanese. Stable, easy Unix with good hardware, in a laptop that was only 5% more than the similarly configured Compaq machine.
UI had nothing to do with it.
I feel more and more inclined to buy an Apple laptop. Is that gay?
No. That flamboyant feeling is your money burning a hole through your pocket.
tell application "Terminal"
do script with command "[insert command]"
end tell
Imagine that you have a library, and a librarian is filing away new books. When she is done filing them, she puts entries into the card catalog downstairs for the new books. The card catalog represents a filesystem's metadata.
Now imagine that the librarian falls out of a 2nd story window into a dumpster and is carted away before she finishes filing the books and updating the catalog. You have no idea what books were filed; you have to perform an exhaustive search of the library to ensure that the card catalog is correct, which takes a long time. This was fsck before journaling.
Servers with large amounts of disk space cannot afford extensive fsck times after a crash. It can take hours.
Now imagine that the librarian keeps a small notepad of the books that she is filing, and when she meets her sticky end, the new librarian can read the notepad, check and verify the new entries, then update the card catalog to a consistent state. We assume that the notepad is updated before the book is filed, so if we have an incomplete notepad entry, the librarian died and the entry can be disregarded. The notepad corresponds to the journal in a journaling file system.
It takes time to write a journal, so journaling filesystems will always be at least a little slower than non-journaling equivalents, design improvements aside.
Most journaling filesystems will only guard the card catalog (metadata). Some, such as VxFS and ext3, can also be made to journal the books (data), but performance goes down because so much more goes through the log.
Another feature to look for in journaling filesystems is dynamic inode creation. ext3 does not have this feature - you can only have so many card catalog entries, and when you exceed them, you can't add any more new books. XFS, for example, can create new inodes on the fly as long as you have disk space.
For Sun people, it is always a surprise to find that Sun's UFS does journaling (you don't have to buy Veritas VxFS), but you have to turn it on with an option in /etc/vfstab.
While OSX may not carry the open group stamp of approval it is UNIX just as much as the BSD's and Linux. It has enough common herritage that most UNIX applications are trivial ports and for most people that is what matters.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I assume that this rumor means that the new FS will be "more extensive" in its journaling capabilities, not features.
NTFS supports DACLs (Discretionary Access Control Lists. Grant rights specifically on files, folders, or both for any specific combination of rights. Yes, even includes things like execute, though most users don't get THAT granular.) It also supports Auditing via an ACL-like mechanism. Wanna see if user sally01 read file X? Add her with READ to the audit list. Who is renaming files in c:\docs? add Everyone with rename/modify to the Audit list.
NTFS does quotas, junction points (links), and reparse points. Reparse points allow things like EFS to work without the app being aware of it. If I wanted to replace the word "microsoft" with BORK BORK BORK on the disk, I could write a parsing driver and install it. Then, any file with my driver's signature in its reparse point list would be handed off to my driver for processing before being saved to disk or read from disk to an application.
There are plenty of other features as well, but the point is that to be a better filesystem than NTFS would take a huge amount of work on the filesystem itself, plus getting the OS to support it. However it is relatively easy to attack a specific point of NTFS (its journaling) and make your filesystem do that specific thing better.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
"I've been super impressed by OS X having used it as my primary laptop for the last couple weeks. It really is a great unix box- and this is one of the important missing puzzle pieces."
h tml
For the n'th time, OS X != UNIX!!!
Tell Apple that.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/unix.html
While you're at it, tell ESR too. BSD = "a family of Unix versions".
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/BSD.
Lame.
Considering that UNIX is a trademark, they obviously had to get someone's stamp of approval to use it.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/unix.html
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
When the word Elvis is used, the words bloat, dead, and clusters (like peanut clusters) come to mind. I think marketing could have picked a better name for the FS.
It does in OS X... sorta.
Window controls focus as they are moused over, but it does not switch to that window. The main problem with focus follows mouse on a Mac (X or Classic) is that the menu bar is not attatched to the window but is, rather, at the top of the screen. They would be impossible to use if the focus switched on your way up there.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
So it's okay to rip off the look and feel of the OS?
Gimme some cheese, assface. This rat is peckish.
Wow Taco, I thought OS X was cool, but seeing that you've actually figured out a way to use an OS as a laptop, you've definitely uncoverd a cool hidden feature on OS X that no else knows about. Maybe that's why Jaguar costs $120 USD, you don't even need a computer to use it!!!
I'm sorry, mod me down now, but it had to be said. :P
there are plenty of liquid like themes for linux
,use apple osx.
linux is free as in speech and often as in beer!
if you use apple and msoffice then you are delaying
people getting off office and ms proprietary formats.
linux is where it is at.
just bcs all the movie and tv people sneak apple
products into the scenes don't change the fact,
apple is ersatz cool.
if you want to change os
if you want to change the world use linux.
There is no way window focus will ever follow the mouse in OS X because all windows share the same menu bar.
If window focus followed the mouse it would be impossible to use menu commands on window selections; the commands would disappear as soon as you moved the mouse out of the window.
I'm typing this on an iBook with an extenal firewire disk. I actually have bootable systems on the drive, one of which is a clone of my internal disk. (backup) When I boot off of the firewire, things can go bad if the cable accidentally gets pulled out. We'll have to look at the options and see how the performance hit works in practice before any real judgements can be made.
Anyone with Darwin CVS access care to share?
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.htm l
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Does journaling also keep track of what files have been copied?
For example, if I wanted to see if someone copied files during an intrusion. (Yes, I am taking proper security precautions you trigger-happy troll.)
First Emmett Plant, now CmdrTaco. Who's next? And what's that big shipment of pods being sent to Michigan from Cupertino? Don't fall asleep...
Wow, that was some horrible grammar. Sorry guys....next time I'll preview ;)
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Obviously this is going to roll out coincident with XServe RAID (the fiberchannel raid box) so sysadmins don't laugh the pretty rack systems out of the data center, but the real winners are laptop users. I've run the battery dry on OSX on more than once, and each time my file system has been fsck'd. (yes, I meant it both ways).
OSX is bad about giving you enough warning to shut down, at least on my pismo, so it's like crashing the OS hard whenever the battery gets low. I've had to reformat twice in the past year and a half because of it.
This is fantastic.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Is this possible?
4 drives in the Xserve are kinda useless without it, less'n you don't mind RAID 0+1 (IIRC OSXS supports that)...
"Instead of patching the original directory, it quickly builds a new replacement directory using data recovered from the original directory thereby recovering files and folders that you thought were lost and that no other program could recover."
Sounds like it would have fixed your machine. It fixed an OS X boot disk of mine which NDD 7 had completely chewed. A few files ended up recovered to a "Recovered Files" directory, but at least I still had them. The damn thing booted right up.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
So with a journaling file system, file metadata will be stored at the filesystem level, not as a component of the files themselves, right? If my understanding is correct, this kinda makes John Siracusa's whining rant about Apple's metadata in OS X being all wrong kind of...pointless. And dumb.
Could it be that maybe, just maybe, Apple had an eye to the future when developing it's file metadata structure? That it's entirely possible that Apple has had this in development for some time and there is a reason they changed their metadata structure? Siracusa seems convinced that it's inconceivable that Macs would ever support a filesystem like the proposed Elvis system and therefore everything they've done to OS X (metadata-wise) is wrong.
I love this new development simply for the reason that it spits in Siracusa's face. He's generally a pretty knowledgable guy, but his metadata article has rubbed me the wrong way for a while and it's good to see that, while accusing Apple of not being forward thinking, he was the one not using the old gray matter.
You all but begged a few weeks ago for a free Titanium. Did you get it, or did you actually buy one? If you got it free, shouldn't you give the vendor some love?
That's what the reaction will be. Because they'll be waiting for Mac OS X to finish booting. OSX fsck's the file systems itself while it boots up. first it fscks the main drive/partition and then after the boot process starts up (and you see the pretty OSX start up screen with the progress bar) it checks other drives/partitions.
So, thankfully, AOL Grandmas running OSX all over the world would not ever have to see the command line.
Gabriel Ricard
Red Hat 8.0 went on an old IBM Thinkpad without a hitch (of course, so did RH 7.x, and 6.2). Wireless NIC, wired NIC, APM, all that works fine. The desktop I could sit my mom in front of. It's not as easy as OS X, sure, but it's come a long way.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Are there any *reliable* kernel modules for Linux 2.2 that will let you use bfs as your filesystem? I heard of a development/test module, but I also heard that it was more in the toy stage then alpha/beta quality.
I really miss the fast, usable bfs from my old BeOS 4.5 box. I never really like 5.0, but 4.5 was awesome. It's unfortunate that they discontinued it, as with some support, it could easily have been wide spread desktop (probably around the popularity that the various BSD flavors are today).
"there are better ways to recover from failures,"
Please tell me these better ways, I've been thinking that avoiding a couple of hours FSCKing a RAID 5 300gb array for 30 seconds of journal checking was great! The performance hit doesn't really matter, since I'm not doing DV-streaming from raw capture over the network..
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
It turns out that what people really want is a non-MS desktop that actually works. Most people over the age of 14 don't give a rat's ass about the ideological aspects at all.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
The damn OS is slow enough already. We really need an extra 10 to 15% slower OS.
Where is my TYPE and CREATOR? OS X is A nice aqua interface with all the user hositility of Unix.
Unlike the old Os 9, where you could find your way and use it the way you like, you realyl have to use the OS the way it wants to be used. The friendly old (yet crash prone) mac os is gone and it REALLY sucks.
File extensions are evil.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
And this is news because some idiot OSX user thinks that Linux doesn't have one?
Uhhhhh....everybody has access to the CVS repository. Look here
You say
MAC OS Not an Emulator API
WINE rocks.
Anyone want to comment on developing a graphical layer compatible with COCOA? Is that possible at all?
I would like to see a free implementation on every i386 using darwing + MACOSNE (?)
Comments?
Same was true on VMS and come to that pretty much every log based file system I have used, speed increased on adoption.
Now I suspect that is mainly a function of the age of the file systems being replaced. FAT32 was used for disks that were way bigger than were thought of when it was introduced as an interim hack to keep FAT going.
The thing that is odd about apple is that they have taken so very long to catch up. Microsoft have had a journaling file system for almost 10 years now. NTFS is now supported in XP meaning that all their current O/S products are NTFS based.
The article did not mention what 'above and beyond' might mean. What I want and just about the only O/S feature I would switch for is automatic file versioning a la VMS.
On VMS the O/S would automatically keep backup copies of you files for you. So you edit a word document, save it out to disk and you have my.doc;1 and my.doc;2. This is emulated in some applications (e.g. emacs) but none of the mainstream O/S has the feature.
It would be pretty easy to add as an option, NTFS already allows for folders to be encrypted or compressed. Verisioning could be another option, so you would turn on versioning for a folder and specify the number of copies of the files to keep. If you ran out of disk space (unlikely for me, I buy a new hard drive whenever I get to 50% capacity) you could run a purge command.
WNT already reserves the ; character for use in versioning. All we need to do is to convince the Microsofties that Apple is planning to implement it and we would get it implemented in a service pack within 48 hours :-)
This is not a substitute for a code manager but I used to use the same in combination. I did not commit new versions until the code actually ran (or a major change that almost ran). file level versioning you would use between compiles, so you try a modification, discover it was a disaster and back it out, or you have some finger trouble and delete a critical mod and you can back it out.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Won't there be performance and stability impacts from basing it on HFS+ instead of a more modern framework?
HFS+ isn't "modern"? HFS+ was released along with Mac OS 8.1, in 1998. HFS+ is four years old. That doesn't exactly *seem* ancient.
Honestly, this is a serious question-- i don't know very much about filesystem design. From what i do know, it does seem to make perfect sense that filesystem journaling could be implemented as an invisible, optional layer on top of an existing filesystem. But i could be wrong.
What, exactly, is it that is not "modern" about the four-year-old HFS+? Have there been some new advances in the theory of filesystems since then? I notice there seems to have been a lot of work in the world of new linux filesystems (reiserfs, ext3, etc) but i for one don't know the differences between all this stuff.
Would you like to explain what i missed?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Frankly, I could care less about the menu items myself. Losing that is only small loss of functionality that sloppy cursor control has. You can still enter text in windows in the background and manipulate the widgets on that window. You can still hit key commands that correspond to menu items...
Sloppy cursor controll will eventully make it into Mac OS X. It's just not clear whether Apple is going to do it or a 3rd party is going to write a hack for it.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
It's the Linux I started out with, and the one I still use on my desktop to this day: Slackware. More BSD than any of the other Linuxen.
Okay, I dig it, you like your computer. No, my bad, its not a computer--its a mac. Wow wee. I mean, anyone who has been reading the slashdot posts knows that you guys like your macs a lot.
But this is insane. A post that says "Gee, I like macs and you should too" and it gets rated +4, Interesting. Its like slashdot has been invaded by Apple's marketing team, only these are people who at any other time can see through hype and bullshit. Its sad at how zealous you people can seem over some company's product.
I say you people need to all get together with your favorite "Think Different" T-shirts and parade down some suburban street with signs and flyers singing in unison "I like macs; they are cool. We like macs because they rule!" Perhaps if you saw other people doing this, you'd have some idea how ridiculous you all seem.
Please, leave the marketing to the folks who get paid for it. And then we can get back to talking about stuff that matters.
I just tried a search through google for "how to make PC video editing not suck" and the forth response down is:
"Windows Movie Maker can't hold a digital candle to iMovie"
Problem solved! That's how I solved my problem with the PC being incredibly touchy when editing video (dropping frames, software crashing, etc.), I bought a Powerbook. Now I can do whatever I like when editing or grabbing DV feeds.
Now let's see, there's a guy who bought a computer that could do the task he wanted to do out of the box, and then there's you who would spend many hours pouring through web sites with the result that you might or might not have a working solution. Who's the moron?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
With the availiability of fast open source journeling file systems like jfs xfs reiserfs ext3 etc. Why go to the bother of developing a new one?
what extra benifits does it have apart from being slower?
Meta data is suported in xfs (and reiserfs4 i think)
The translation from hfs+ to xfs could done as a mach service(this being the entire point of microkernels you can add support for things like new disk types without touching the kernel space). or is this why its slow? The system has to do yet another context switch to run the translation service?
So why are apple just reinventing the wheel given all the existing oss projects?
Tell me why journaling is exactly good for OSX and HFS+. As long as i've used it, i've never experienced any huge amount of data corruption on it. I've used the same HFS+ partition for about 4 years without a problem (needless to say, i'm abusive of it, and frequently cut the power without properly shutting down).
Most of the comments here are refrencing journaling to Ext2, and other unix filesystems which DO have data-loss problems in the absence of journaling. But, for the most part, I've never seen massive data loss with HFS+ and FAT32.
It also has been brought up that storing the journal on another disk can eliminate the performance decrease. Personally, I could see apple moving to standardize RAID on its high(er) end systems and servers(they've already standardized SMP); or even possibly adding like 256mb of non-volitile memory to store the journal (a small hard disk would also work).
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Journalling filesystems are the way to go, but if you do any work on your computer, you should still keep backups.
What does this mean?
That I can tell a file in finder that i will keep a version of each day it was changed?
Somethink like CVS for free? On every file I want with a decent interface in Finder?
THAT would be cool!
Using the transaction mechanism not only on the filesystem, but FILES THEMSELVES, and setting up timers when small changes will be "added" into larger ones... GREAT!
Hopefully that wasn't a typo in eWeeks report. Can't wait for it.
http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/documenta tion/howto/html/Building_Darwin_HOWTO.html
/tmp/roots) should be a UFS filesystem, otherwise some packages will not build correctly (because of HFS+'s case insensitivity). To run the buildall script execute the following as root:
Before running the buildall script, you should setup your anoncvs environment, as discussed earlier. Also, your build location (specified in the BUILDIT_DIR environment variable, defaulting to
With some additions it could be up to par to Cocoa.
But I think you want Quartz (Extreme) for free. Forget about that. Won't happen anytime soon. Apples programmers aren't that bad that it could be copied that easy. It might be easiert to
- write a PPC emulator for x86 and run darwin native on x86
- convince Apple to make Cocoa/Quartz for x86 (maybe even Linux) without the hassle-free magic of MacOS X.
The last thing would be very clever: This would broaden the sales base for MacOS X applications and those how tried some of the apps might think that it IS worth to buy the real thing... . And Apple doesn't have to fear that GNUStep will try catch up really hard. Most x86/Linux users will pay some bucks for something like this if they could run some really cool applications. BTW: I call this set of binaries "Lucy".
Anyone remember? One of these days I'm going to install one of the really ghetto early versions of BeOS on my BeBox. One of the versions where the Pulse app could turn off both processors :).
im on 350 mhz g4, and OS X hasnt been sluggish since 10.2. try a new one at your local apple store
Last I checked NTFS support in Linux was unreliable and so FAT is the only useable alternative for dual booters. (No flames on that, I boot Linux i386 and ppc, Mac OS X, and only when I have to Windows.) I don't want to waste disk space on an OS I hardly use and format it into a read only filesystem.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
for you.
I know of one AOL Grandma who has only one troubleshooting strategy: she power cycles her iMac whenever she has a computer problem.
Doug Moen
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
The metadata that John Siracusa is asking for is actually very different. He's interested in seeing additional attributes added for files -- things like the file's MIME type, preferred handler, etc.
Be's BFS had all of these things, but not just as part of the journal. There was a lot more to BFS than just the journaling part!
woudl kill for an apple,
Jeez. What would you do for an orange?
Maybe somebody who will decide to help out and investigate instead of just being a smart-ass?
The same complaint you make about the slashdot headline can be made about the eWeek headline, which is "Look Out Enterprise: Mac OS X to Get Journaling".
The first three words of the slashdot story are 'According to eWeek'. In fact, the eWeek article only mentions that Apple Computer hasn't confirmed the announcment in the second paragraph.
What's more, the slashdot headline makes no indication either way about whether the announcement is official; all slashdot headlines in the Apple category are preceded by "Apple:"
If you feel that eWeeks handleing of unconfirmed nature of this story is appropriate, you must also feel that slashdot's handleing is appropriate. Posting complaints about slashdot's shoddy journalism is about as original as remarking on the potential of beowulf clusters. Get over it.
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
Mac OS X to get Journaling FS ...
Posted by CmdrTaco
GET A %*&#^*@ 3-BUTTON... oh, wait a minute
I've been super impressed by OS X having used it as my primary laptop for the last couple weeks...
No 1-button mouse joke?
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
If you buy a copy of Computer Waiting Games and give Power Strip Russian Roulette a try, journaling might be very nice thing to have.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
..but what about Windows XP Home edition?
--- What
An O/S dies very easily, all that is required is for its kernel developer to is stop working on it. No driver -> stops working on new hardware -> no developer -> no user.
I understand the importance of having the source code for something so I can modify it to meet my needs.
However, as long as the open source community doesn't "get" the concept of user interface usability, they really can't be trusted with something like the source code for Apple's GUI layer. If they were allowed to have the code, they would turn Apple's UI into some completely unusable piece of trash that deprives end-users of a valuable freedom: the freedom to get work done with a minimum of fuss. In other words, they would turn Apple's GUI layer into something resembling the mess that is GNOME and KDE.
It's really a lot like Star Trek's Prime Directive. Until a civilization has reached a state of evolution where they are intelligent and moral enough to not misuse and abuse a piece of advanced technology, it is critical to keep that piece of technology out of their hands. When the open source community has evolved to the point where they no longer have religious problems with spaces in filenames, when they can understand why "System Preferences" is preferable to "etc", when they can use the word "folder" instead of "directory", when they stop expressing derision and hostility towards usability professionals, and when they leave their command-line anti-newbie rtfm baggage out of the GUI design, then and only then should they be given the source code to Apples GUI layer.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
...on being the first member of the ex-SGI thursday poker crowd to get a headline on /.
These are *very* good examples of how Apple, while being a for-profit company, does some GREAT things for keeping with standards.
gsfprez,
It might be worth your time to give a closer look to some of Think Secret's exclusive Mac insider news from this past year. As you indicated, circa 2000 we did indeed transition from an opinion/speculation site to a publication resembling what we are today. Not only have we broken some of the biggest Apple stories out there, but I'm proud of our accuracy.
I think our record for the past two years speaks for itself, and I invite others to examine our archives to reach their own conclusion.
If you truly believe that every news article drawing on facts not officially released from Apple is "rumor," then I suppose we have a fundamental difference of opinion.
Thanks for reading,
Nick dePlume
Publisher and Editor in Chief, Think Secret
http://www.thinksecret.com
If you are totaly paranoid about dataloss use a really robust filesystem (Amiga OFS/FFS linked-list type filesystems comes to mind, where even with 90% of your disk gone you could still recover the rest, these systems are horribly slow though),or a better, faster but more expensive solution is to have minimal ram cache and have a caching raid controller with large battery-backed'up cache, like the Compaq SMART controllers.
Ordo Militum Unix.
I welcome the Journaled File System to OSX and certainly hope they are able to improve performance on machines. I'll gladly give up HFS+ for a good file system that has all the benefits of XFS. I'd like to see it make improvements over the much touted BFS and I hope it will be a 64-bit Journaled File System that allows attributes to be searched quickly much like BeOS and if possible clustering like SGI does with their XFS disks in CXFS.
X _2 000/
Here is a great article by Wilfredo Sánchez on Mac OS and Unix. In it is an extensive explanation on HFS, HFS+ and UFS.
http://www.mit.edu/people/wsanchez/papers/USENI
-Diganta
But if moving your mouse to the menue bar always triggers you to go back to the finder on the way there, how the hell do you find out what the command keys for any specific program are, much less use the functions that don't have command keys? I'd like to see this implimented in the finder itself maybe, but I don't see Apple ever putting it in for applications as aa whole.
Mod point free since 2001
Did you mean Power Mac? Apple stopped selling Quadras in 1995.
So, with apologies to Sergeant Hulka, "Uh, son... there ain't no Quadras no more." :-)
...but I had to know.
..."I've been seeking and not finding. I've got to get my head on straight and fly right... No more fragmented block-head behavior... Life goes so smoothly when I remember where I put things... No more crashing and burning on weekends ... take writing class..."
I hesitated and nearly turned around - but, I decided - I had to know. In the end, I, gave in to my curiosity. So I looked around to see if she had come back from from the Platters concert. She'd gone with a scuzzy looking friend who'd twisted her arm to get her to go - to 'decompress' he said. I think the guy has a one track mind, after all, she was really stacked. Slowly I opened the cover and read the words... "Dear Journal..." it went on
My suspicions were for naught. Her mind was on work - not him. Guess I won't have to give him the boot. The magnetic attraction I thought was there was a bad read on my part... I closed the book and walked away - humming a little tune.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Oh yeah. And BeOS still rocks, even though it is LONG DEAD! LONG LIVE THE DEAD!
To paraphrase FlavorFlav: get your terminology correct, slashdot geek.
A filesystem (HFS+) is in no sense a framework.
HFS+ is a relatively modern filesystem developed in the mid-to-late 90's for Maxwell, making it as "modern" (in terms of "performance and stability") as necessary.
A useful filesystem---on any platform---is more than a simple compile. Try it sometime.
Journaling should be a nifty addition to Mac OS.
Your iambic pentameter needs a little work. Keep trying.
- learn to swim.
My question is, what other advantages are there? E.g. would a journaling file system mean that general, ongoing file system maintenance is somehow better? Or, if you can afford to wait for fsck once in a while, are you pretty much just as well off?
Actually, the whole jumping back to the Finder could probably be moot. The algorithm should look at where the cursor is going. If it's moving rapidly towards the top of the screen then don't change the menu bar. If the mouse isn't moving in the general direction to the top of the screen or has since slowed down from heading to the top of the screen then change the focus as necessary.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
It doesn't, really.
There are many nice things about OS X, and there are many not so nice things about it as well. Overall, there is no clear winner between OS X or Linux--it really depends on the application and the user. For many current Linux users, OS X simply is is not a workable alternative. For home users, however, OS X is an excellent choice, not because of any technical differences, but simply because it comes pre-packaged with its hardware and because lots of stores carry it.
Apart from the current lack of JFS support - no Mandatory Access Controls, no Access Control Lists and no process control (i.e. it's not possible to limit process to ports, or to limit what data they can read, write and append to) and the fact that anyone with the root user id can totally control the system uninhibited mean OS X that will stay on my PowerBook and GNU/Linux will stay on our server farm.
It's the same reason that I just junked FreeBSD (installed by the previous project lead) for GNU/Linux (which is able to do all of these things, with the appropriate kernel patches).
It's just not up to it for Serious Serving (TM) (though I'll admit that most installations are half assed and done by professionaly incompetant goofballs and don't use many, or indeed any of these features [I should say this is a general point and not aimed at the previous project lead, lol - in fact it's based more around the many overpaid luser consultants I've met]).
GNU/Linux is only only hard to use if your not a competant Unix Systems Engineer, infact I find it easier than *BSD, HP-UP, AIX, IRIX, GNU/HURD, and Solaris. Though I run Debian on the desktop much of this improved easy of use is primarily due to the work Red Hat have done in making their distribution much more suited to a coporate environment.
As I understand it, full data journaling is not really practical for most user applications. If you journal to the same physical device that the main filesystem is on, there's a big performance penalty because you essentially have to write everything twice.
Not always so. Full data journalling can speed up situations where you rapidly read and write the same file or many small files - because you are reading and writing directly to/from the journal (a small area of disk). Hence shorter seek times.
No the journaling file system is keeping track of the file systems meta data - where a file exists on the disk. This is completely unrelated to what Siracusa has been complaining about.
Siracusa is complaining about the lack of richness in a file's metadata and the fact that some of the most important meta-data is stored messily and unnecessarily as part of another unrelated bit of meta-data (the file type being stored as part of the file name). His ideal would be files that stored a lot more useful metadata in a logical well designed and extensible way.
POWER OUTAGE! You have no control over them. Even with the 1500VA UPS I use, if the power is out long enuogh, my systems will suddenly find the floor dropped out from below them into the void of not-running-land. I haven't setup auto-shutdown based on UPS feedback, either, so it would be a crash-like situation.
I don't want to recover from a 4-hour power outage (and comensurate loss of service) with a 3-hour fsck, nor do I have the money to buy a generator and redo the electricity setup for the server room for the megalong power outage problem.
Plus, for my RAID5 array, the journalling does batch up writes (allowing the RAID card to keep more spindles active).
Sacrificing stability, better consistency in the worst-case scenario, and a general faster startup time in case of problems for a slighly faster best-case scenario (which evaporates in most common server configs, since the VFS cache layer does most of the work anyways on my gig-ram fileservers, webservers, and so on), is not a win. The choice between speed and quality is no choice at all.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
That is the stupidest thing I have heard all day.
Make OS X run on X86 hardware and you'd really have something there!
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
Without a journalling filesystem, online defrag is pretty much impossible. Unless of course you try to defrag the way Win98 did...
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
The OS provides language-specific functions to convert from lowercase to uppercase. Use them.
Instead of just use
If the OS doesn't provide these functions, then the OS needs to be improved. It's the programmer's job to make the user's life easier, not the other way around. Once upon a time developers actually knew that.
I have to actually agree with that anonymous coward here. Having the finder determing when you atomatically switch to a differnt program based on what the finder thinks you want to do is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Try explaining that one to grandma.
Mod point free since 2001
Actually, I did get it, and greped extensively. No dice. Don't be so damned quick to judge, git-brained coward.
You say
Why? - I'm trying to understand how much of an advance the journaling filesystem will be. As an OS X user, I'm also curious about how much benefit I would get in exchange for the "10-15%" disk performance hit.
Online defrag sounds good. But I'm not running any UFS filesystems- just HFS+. I'm not entirely clear on the importance of defragging on UFS vs. HFS+. Sigh- so much to learn- but I'm loving being a part of the UNIX world...
Actually both those links look like great tools and exactly what I want, I'll take a look! The price seems decent too for either one.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I dunno. Waiting for a lengthy fsck can be very satisfying at times. Other times, I just want to get a quick fsck and go on about my business. (Typically around noon.) Depends on the day, I guess.
The advantages to such a system? Well, like you said, if you can afford to wait for a lengthy fsck once in a while, you're okay. If you just can't contain yourself, though, it might be worthwhile to go ahead and get it over with. The only problem with this is that if you absolutely cannot make it all the way through a slow fsck, you might pick up a reputation and/or an unflattering nickname ("Minuteman", for example.) It all depends on what you want; if instant gratification is important to you, you should be fine, modulo the occasional heckling and snickering by coworkers who are plugged into the office rumor mill. (But see touch(3); it may be more worth your while if you're all about speed as opposed to endurance, and might help with the problem of other people's cruel tendencies.)
Hope this helps.
-SD
I am Chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are Free. -Eris
Since then he's been co-writing articles every now and then with dePlume (that's a pen name, who knows that the guy's real name).
Nick as in nickname and dePlume as in "nom de plume" (French for pen name)? I think you're right.
Xavier
Do I make sense? Please report if not.
If your grandma wants to use sloppy cursor control then chances are she won't need it explained to her. Sloppy cursor control would be an option. I don't think anyone ever suggested it be on by default...
Anyway, this type of prediction is already done in the interface too so you can still hit submenus easily. It's not something new.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Matter-of-fact i 'eard its the other way round, according to a documentary i saw, roughly 90% of PC users are homosexual, whereas a mere 0.5% of mac users are gay.