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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.
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.
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.
Though it will cost you 10% to 15% performance penalty
This refers to hard disk access time penalties, not an overall 10-15% reduction in the performance of your computer. You wouldn't notice the difference.
Pish. I have a Pismo (500MHz G3 PowerBook) and a 933 G4. While the G4 is a lot faster, the Pismo is a delight to use and leaves me with no complaints.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
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!
I predict that it will become faster with time.
Just looking at how OS X itself has progressed in speed from Public Beta (slug with brick tied to it), to 10.0 (slug), to 10.1 (average lazy human), to 10.2 (average lazy human drinking strong coffee), I expect that by 10.3 this technology will not give nearly such a performance hit.
And heck. Don't like the speed hit? Turn it off.
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
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?
OS X doesn't really need a fast G4, any G4 is good as long as you have a shedload of RAM. That's the real OS X bottleneck, which is easily solved by a quick trip to Crucial.com.
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
Actually this will only effect the Hard disk access, which is exactly on par with every other desktop hard disk access. This would be equiv to upgrading to NTFS from Fat32's performance hit (Ie unless you run a file oriented database you wouldn't be able to tell)
The only place Apple currently lags is in the CPU, we all hope the Power4 will fix that, but it is true at present. Every other component is just fine, thats why offloading the UI rendering to the GPU caused such a dramatic speedup.
I live in a giant bucket.
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?
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
Won't notice a difference? You must be crazy. The hard drive is the bottleneck of modern PCs. Making them slower slows the computer down noticeably, or at least to anyone who actually would *use* their computer.
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.
Disk Read Failure: The King is dead.
-----
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?
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.
-----
jonathan barket
The critical differences for me are that Apple stuff Just Works, Really Really Well, OS X is a Unix, and Apple seems to be philosophically opposed to Digital Rights Restrictions.
Whether or not they'd be like this if they were in a monopoly position is up to debate, but Apple is currently a far less evil company than Microsoft. Instead of putting roadblocks up for me, the Mac makes most things I want to do far easier.
Actually, going from FAT32 to NTFS increases performance, not decrease. I don't know if that's a result of NTFS being so good or FAT32 being so bad. I'll take the latter.
And heck. Don't like the speed hit? Turn it off.
You mean leave it off. The reports say the feature will be disabled by default. Which makes sense; most people don't need it.
I write in my journal
FYI, Ramjet's usually cheaper. I don't know what system you're running, but 512MB's of laptop RAM for my flatpanel iMac's user slot is $99 - Crucial lists it at $110 after a rebate.
:)
Triv
Blockquoth the poster:
When Apple has retaken 95% of the market and starts using its 100 MWatt master Airport transmitters to force-download 3 GB trailers for 'Toy Story 5' onto my desktop, then I'll worry...
The only place Apple currently lags is in the CPU, we all hope the Power4 will fix that....
I'm sorry to nitpick, but you're talking about the PowerPC 970. (AKA GPUL) The newly announced chip is not the same as the POWER4. They share some architectural aspects, like the instruction set, but they're not the same.
Again, sorry for nitpicking. It's just that this is a really confusing matter, what with the POWER4 chip and the POWER architecture and the Amazon architecture and the PowerPC architecture and the PowerPC chips and... so on.
I write in my journal
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.
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
Hm, im fully aware OSX is leveraging OpenSource via Fink.
By Putting Aqua ontop of BSD, they have very neatly co-opted all the work of the BSDers. While I do understand that is within the rights granted in a BSD license, I wonder if those BSD coders look favourably - or see themselves as - being the Unpaid Development Team Apple has co-opted.
OSX is decidedly NOT Free Software - Apple has selling OSX by saying "Here, we'll give the Car Away for Free (Darwin), but you cant have the keys unless you pay-to-play (Aqua).
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!
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.
If you are so attached to your computer that the software it runs *really* dictates how "free" or "enslaved" you are, then I think you have much bigger problems.
Computers, and the information they hold and route, that we are all so addicted to, are just toys. Computers are the ultimate distraction by which we, as a culture, impress ourselves with how clever we are. All the while, the quality of our lives becomes increasingly dominated by ones and zeros that don't really exist.
Think about it and tell me, how many hours of your life are spent in front of a computer that runs Free Software or not (it does not matter), *really* making the world a better place? How much of your self-worth is invested in the software you use or write, the games you play, the mp3 collection you build?
If your computer blew up today, how much of a life would you have?
Now tell me who is enslaved and who is free.
Tyler's words coming out of my mouth.
Gimmie a break. There's another kind of freedom: the freedom to get shit done without having to wrestle with the operating system. Remember that when you think about OSX. No slaves here, just someone getting the job done.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
10.0 : Cheetah (fastest animal on earth)
10.1 : Puma
10.2 : Jaguar
10.3 : Panther (slowest big cat?)
America can, should, must, and will install Linux to protect our freedom. We must destroy the terrorism that is Mac OS X.
Onward, GNU soldiers! We cry freedom from coherent, mature GUIs! Freedom from packaging systems that work! Freedom from mature, accountable developers!
And if you consider for one moment "switching" to one of those evil, repugnant, proprietary systems, just Think of the Children, and pray that Stallman will give you strength in your time of weakness. Now we crush the infidels!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
No, Mac OS X's UFS implementation does not yet have softupdates. It's not a top-priority for them either, since most of their users use HFS+. It's been presented as a good OpenDarwin project by Apple engineers on multiple occasions though.
Donate free food here
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.
I'd rather have a plain old UFS filesystem that IS case sensitive than HFS+journaling+whatever.
Then... use one. You can create and mount UFS filesystems with OS X. You can even install the OS on a UFS filesystem, but legacy software often depends on features of HFS/HFS+. So if you don't have any legacy apps, you can run an entire OS X system on UFS.
I write in my journal
I'm using Power4 until a "common name" emerges
The common name is "PowerPC 970." Here's the straight shit.
I write in my journal
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.
I disagree on that.
Either just as bad or even worse. Apple is making a good record of punishing companies that helped them stand up and become one of the largest computer companies.
1. Remember clones? In a day they just cut licensing for clone making practicaly without warning. Even though these companies have helped (take it as you wish, but Apple was in financial crisis in that time) when Apple was selling clone licenses.
2. Every new version of 9.x system broke adobe postscript in favour of laserwriter and OSX. (Although I wouldn't remember any of new features in >9.04 releases)
3. Open source kernel under a false promises. Hell, open source kernel for one type of hardware only. I don't know which x86 can you use with him, everything other is pure proprietary software
For now Apple doesn't keep as good record as MS, but in time when Apple would grow, believe it will.
I've been using Macs for about 6 years now and I'm just looking to completely Switch off.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
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.
The high-end TiBook is well over $5K. $6,059.00 to be exact, and that's without any extra options.
The high-end TiBook is $3,799.00 without any extras. The middle-of-the-road one is $3,199.00.
If you had mentioned the fact that you were quoting prices in Canadian dollars, you could have avoided this correction. Of course, if your purpose was to artificially inflate prices, you should have looked at the Australian store, where a top-end PowerBook goes for a whopping $8,745.00.
I write in my journal
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
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Apple contributing a lot of changes to FreeBSD's codebase?
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
No, "OSX is leveraging OpenSource via Fink
is exactly what I meant.
Fink, is being used by OSX users to leverage the value in OpenSource.
If they don't like it they can always develop GPLed code. Personally, I'd be torqued to have my developments used by a few tens of millions of new people. And some of those developers are quite well paid by Apple BTW.
Yes, some are paid by Apple - big deal. As to the 'marketshare' increase, and the ego-jollies by coders who get a hardon by knowing many people use their code, again, who cares? OSX users are still beholden to Apple. And Im talking about Freedom here. OSX users are as unfree as MS users.
Stay with your GPLed half-baked crap. Me? I've got work to do and OS X actually does it
Wow, How long have you been a Mac User? It looks like the "It just Works" mantra has gotten your head completely shoved up your butt.
Please, come back to reality..
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.
Funny. You scath another poster for not pointing out that he was using Canadian dollars, but you never once said you were quoting USD.
Not everything is US-centric you know. And yes, I *am* an American.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
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.
no clue. It's worked for me in the past, but I honestly have no idea how their quality compares with anyone's. :)
Triv
1. Apple started to sell licenses because of the financial troubles, to expand Mac compatible market. After that, you've got it right. Mac clones canibalised market (price). But, looked from the other side, they expanded Mac market (their low price made Mac market grow). So, you're right on one part of the story
2. I guess you never realised, that one and another PS driver are completely different way drawing on prn canvas. I guess that's why one version printed bad fonts on newer version. Next one took forever to show printer list. Next one oftenly resolved in corrupted DesktopPrinters.DB, etc. But then again, maybe it's just me.
3. Darwin runs on PowerPC-based Macintosh computers and a version is also available for x86-compatible computers. (taken from Apple.com), Question which x86 hardware, but hey, they aren't promising anything, there you're right.
Actualy last point you're getting right. I was working for a computer company and our Mac covering support people sucked. So after hearing complaints I've started to learn all about Macs just to avoid them. It somehow came out that people started turning to me about Mac support and ever since I've funded my own company I'm trying to avoid that dark side (do not take it personaly, but just compare number of files that are visible and files that are not, and there are other examples) of my job, but still not with a complete success.
So take it or leave it. unfortunatelly I'm not the happy Mac user, that blindly believes in that company. My computer times started with Indigo 1.
"Judging by your posting history", well, if you studied me that well, you should've realised that I accept my mistakes if someone proves me other.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
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.
He types with an accent. Give the man a break ;)
(off topic...you bet)
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I like XP OK, but can you run it on a laptop you bought in 1998?
Well, yes, of course you can. Why, did you think you couldn't?
Unless of course you someday decide that you don't want to use the Mac anymore, in which case you'll find you're just as badly locked in to it as 95% of the world is with Windows. I know you might think it crazy that you would ever wish to stop using the Mac, but Apple is a company, and we all know that they are hardly the most consistant things when it comes to doing what you want. What would happen if you wanted to switch to something else?
Well, you'd find that none of your apps would work on the platform of your choice, because the Mac APIs are proprietary, and there is only one implementation of them - the Apple implementation. Notice how easy it is to make open sourced Linux stuff work on the Mac? Yet that it's impossible to do the reverse? What about the Mac file formats? Even the iPod, a frickin MP3 player had to have some format reverse engineered (the index? don't remember). It's not like Apple deliberately throw up these roadblocks (though they have a history of abusing the legal system), it's just a natural consequence of lockin, which is what characterizes these kind of platforms.
[sigh]. I'm tired. Don't get me wrong, this isn't me criticizing OS X or even Apple specifically, not this time. I think it's great you're getting a journaled FS, more power to Apple and as a consequence you
But comments like the above just show that you haven't really experienced the pain of vendor lockin yet. Right now things are peachy. But in the future? What if the upgrade to 10.3 also costs $120? What will you do? Pay up I guess. Well, it's your choice, but at least understand that there are plenty of roadblocks in Mac land, it's just that they're one way only.
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.htm l
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Wow, that was some horrible grammar. Sorry guys....next time I'll preview ;)
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Obviously this is going to roll out coincident with XServe RAID (the fiberchannel raid box) so sysadmins don't laugh the pretty rack systems out of the data center, but the real winners are laptop users. I've run the battery dry on OSX on more than once, and each time my file system has been fsck'd. (yes, I meant it both ways).
OSX is bad about giving you enough warning to shut down, at least on my pismo, so it's like crashing the OS hard whenever the battery gets low. I've had to reformat twice in the past year and a half because of it.
This is fantastic.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Try again, coward.
"As for graphics workstations, office computers with thousands of documents and moreover file-servers, NTFS shows higher performance."
I can port my Cocoa applications to GNUStep with relative ease.
Actually, I'd guess that the memory bus is the bottleneck of modern PC's, but regardless of whether or not I'm right there, journaled filesystems tend to slow down writes more than reads (since reads don't require as many, if any, journal entries). So as far as performance goes, it probably won't slow down the performance of just reads (ie, applications loading) by 10%. The majority of the time, you are doing reads and not writes to the disk.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
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.
Note I don't believe all apps should be open source (well, ideally they should obviously, but that's currently not economically possible). But that's like saying, "There is a POSIX emulation layer for Windows, so I can port my Linux apps to Windows easily". Well, that's true in one way, false in another. There's porting, then there's porting isn't there?
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.
In general, no. I think what you are after is something called auditing, not journaling. The only goal of journaling is to maintain consistancy of the filesystem, not to keep a log of what has happened on the machine for security reasons. The way most journaled filesystems work, after the transaction has been completely written to disk, the journal entry is erased and reused. This won't help you. However, an audit log will. Any system intended as a "trusted" system (SGI has "Trusted Irix" and I think there's a trusted Solaris as well) will do such logging. It will also do a number of other things which you may or may not like to increase your security. I don't know of any open-source auditing packages out there, but one probably exists somewhere.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
This is quite misguided, and is symptomatic of somebody who is obsessed with numbers.
First of all, it's crucial to note that the article is quite vague: "enabling the journaled file system will slow current system performance by 10 percent to 15 percent." What is a "system performance"? Editing a 100 KB document in Word is going to generate a very different load on the file system than streaming a 6 GB video.
Secondly, disk caches anticipate common usage patterns, so that most accesses (especially CPU instruction fetches) are satisfied from the cache in RAM. This means that the access that brought the data in from the disk counts for a much smaller percentage. Compression can also reduce the need for raw bandwidth.
Thirdly, journalling typically does not affect read performance, only write performance. Many applications don't require a great deal of write bandwidth, and those that do typically require a constant minimum bandwidth (capturing video) rather than a high peak bandwidth.
Fourthly, 10% or 15% is quite difficult to detect. Try to see if a friend can tell the difference between 10 seconds or 11 seconds. Try other durations if you wish. Then try to do it without counting ticks.
Finally, users can be distracted by appropriate eye candy. This is not a joke - it's a serious (and cheap) engineering solution.
In conclusion, no, the hard disk is not necessarily a bottleneck, and no, the computer may or may not slow down noticeably. The benefits of journalling, on the other hand, are well known.
There is absolutley NO reason for case-insensitivity to be in the file system except for back compatability! Trying to make any other argument and you will soon look like a moron.
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.
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
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
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.
WRONG.
Try using Apple's Remote Desktop or Mozilla on UFS. Lots of applications break on UFS, and not "legacy" applications, but native, new applications. If even Apple's Remote Desktop software won't work with UFS, how much luck do you think you'll have with large commercial applications like Adobe's stuff? I won't even mention the performance problems with UFS on OS X.
Why would you care? Because you cannot access forks when using standard unix programs on HFS systems. Do this: install some largish application, such as Office on a UFS machine. Create a tarball of the .app directory. Now untar this tarball on a HFS system. Works fine. However: try creating a tarball on an HFS system. You can't.
So, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to use your pretty little tools like Stuffit Expander? Go ahead and try using stuffit using an ssh session logged in from a Windows box across the city. Am I supposed to download some inane perl script to do this? And am I expected to download this perl script whenever I want to distribute that archive to another machine?
OS X does not give you any ability to do the most basic filesysem manipulation in any meaningful fashion without ridiculous third-party tools, most of which were designed for a specific purpose unlike the standard unix tools which I can use to make backups, "image" machines, distribute archives, duplicate directory hierarchies, and a host of other things.
If you've never typed
then you won't understand that OS X is deficient as a Unix operating system.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.
Lots of applications break on UFS....
You know, you've got a point. When I said "legacy applications" I really should have said "applications that use legacy APIs." Of course, I don't think that really justifies the monster screed that you wrote.
Mac OS X is a hybrid system. It is based on UNIX-- no arguments about trademarks, please; I mean "UNIX" in the traditional, not literal, sense-- but it incorporates all of the features of the original Mac OS. A key feature of Mac OS is the idea of a forked file. Moving forked files to filesystems that don't support them naturally doesn't work. Also, moving forked files with tools that only touch the data segment naturally doesn't work.
Are you supposed to download an "inane Perl script?" No. You're supposed to use ditto. See the ditto man page for more information.
Just because Mac OS X is based on UNIX doesn't mean that it's not also a Mac OS.
OS X does not give you any ability to do the most basic filesysem manipulation in any meaningful fashion without ridiculous third-party tools....
That's simply untrue. You need to spend a little time checking out the man pages, that's all.
I write in my journal
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!
I apologize for replying twice, but I accidentally clicked submit before I'd finished my response.
All I had left to say was this: I've looked at your posting history, and you seem to be a pretty educated and reasonable person. I don't know what the root of your bilious attitude toward OS X is. Maybe you've had one or more bad experiences, or maybe you just got up on the wrong side of the bed. Whatever the cause, I'd suggest that you try to cool it for a little while and give OS X a shot. Don't let the fact that you have to learn some new tools-- like ditto-- get you down, okay?
I write in my journal
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 /.
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
Yeah, but the poster is referring to a 500 Mhz job. Apple came out with the 450 Quadra at the end of 1998 for ~$4000 (US), so I was pretty much assuming expensive. ;p
This is somewhat ironic, as I was in the middle of composing a reply to your first comment when I read your second comment. I'm including my reply below (although it's vitriol, sometimes it's fun to read vitriol).
OS X isn't as bad as I make it out to be. The nicest thing is that a number of the bullet points I've used for rants in the past have subsequently been fixed by Apple's newer releases. The Objective C Cocoa APIs are also quite amazing, even though it took me some time to figure out how to get a vi/zsh/make development environment working rather than relying completely on the GUI stuff (which is very nice for dialog design type stuff but will never replace my beloved vi). Comparing the Cocoa APIs to something like GTK really shows how advanced some of their stuff is.
Although it probably won't replace my Solaris and FreeBSD workstations, OS X might find a place alongside them. I'll try to be more understanding. After all, almost anything's better than win32 programming :)
Original rant:
Er, I meant 500 Mhz on the Quadra. It was the 450 Mhz PII that was out at about the same time. I hate it when I do that.
Well said. I have no problem at all with vitriol, as long as I can see where it's coming from. In your first post, I couldn't understand where the rage was coming from. Now I understand, and your points are totally valid. I still have a higher opinion of OS X than you do, evidently, but that's certainly because I use it differently than you do.
I write in my journal
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
11.4 Maltese Falcon (not very quick)
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
You mean G3, right? Quadras haven't existed in years. A beige G3 was what you got in G3. Not sure when the B&W ones came along.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Oh yeah. And BeOS still rocks, even though it is LONG DEAD! LONG LIVE THE DEAD!
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.
Thanks for the link - in the second paragraph they state that the PowerPC 970 is a POWER4 derivative.
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
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.
Sorry I don't see how a laptop and an OS are closely associated. A "laptop" and a "notebook" are; a laptop and software are not.
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
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.