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.

Comments

You can give me a journaling FS

[Faggot]

...when you pry HFS+ from my cold, dead hands.

No, wait. Give me that.

Existing Journaling Systems?

[aburnsio.com]

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)?

Re:Existing Journaling Systems?

[StressedCoder]

This seems like an entirely new system, because the BSD type systems do not have journaling, and there is no such system on the forseable horizon.

FreeBSD provides something called softupdates, which do much to alievate the need for a journaling system. And it does this without the performance hit. When FreeBSD 5.0 comes out it will do something called snapshoting, which will bring even more stability (and background fsck) without much of a performance hit. NetBSD provides (I think) a different implementation of softupdates. OpenBSD might too, I don't know.

Which makes me very disappointed that apple chose this route. Softupdates+Snapshots solves the problem without the performance hit. BSD doesn't need no stinking journaling.

Re:Existing Journaling Systems?

[h0tblack]

Difficult to say that anything is totally new, I suspect this is 'new' but it will no doubt be influenced by previous work on BeOS, other filesystems the engineer has worked on, and other filesystems in general.
I suspect the advantage of having it based on HFS+ is at least partly to do with compatibility. At the moment you can install OS X on a UFS partition, but some apps won't play nice. Hopefully 'Elvis' will get around this problem and give users more options.

Re:Existing Journaling Systems?

[jazman_777]

OpenBSD uses softupdates (still in development, need an fsck still). Right here. The linked papers are useful reads.

Re:Existing Journaling Systems?

[Anonymous Coward]

And that is why on *BSD will never be deployed in the enterprise.

Very astute. It was Windows 98's excellent FAT32 file system that led to its adoption at this and so many other enterprises.

Re:Existing Journaling Systems?

[sirket]

No there really isn't. LFS has been dead on FreeBSD for years. Soft-Updates is reliable and very fast. With the ability to do snapshots, there will be no reason to use an LFS or JFS.

-sirket

Re:Existing Journaling Systems?

[falzer]

Soft-Updates

Unix using a feature with unabbreviated, capitalized words? What is the world coming to?

a bit offtopic, but

[comp.sci]

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.

Re:a bit offtopic, but

[jbarket]

I made the switch over last December. Love it. I was really more of a FreeBSD user, but you get the idea. It's wonderful to be able to have an attractive GUI with all too many bells and whistles to work with, but still be able to throw up a terminal window with bash and work with the real heart of things if you feel the need. Plus the ability to run XFree86 rootless on top of the GUI is nice.

Re:a bit offtopic, but

[papasui]

A beautiful interface with great professional products available (photoshop, office, etc.) while keeping the ability to run nix software.

Re:a bit offtopic, but

[MoneyT]

Don't know what moron modded you flamebait but...

On top of being able to run *most* of the software that Linux will run, OS X also gives you Photoshop, M$ Office and other commercial apps, a bunch of non commercial apps (www.macosxapps.com, most of the old classic apps and Virtual PC which will get just about any Windows app other than games working on the mac.

If there is some linux program that you just can't live without that wont run under OS X, you also have the option to install Linux on your laptop as well.

Re:a bit offtopic, but

[xtremex]

MOST Linux distros have a couple of Journaling file systems. ext3 being the most common. JFS (from IBM) and XFS (From SGI aka IRIX) are others. I use JFS on my home partition and ext3 everywhere else with naru a performance hit....actually, ext3 has been out for almost 1 years and a half with Kernel 2.4.10

Re:a bit offtopic, but

[IamTheRealMike]

what other important features has OSX that Linux has not.

huh? Linux has quite a few journaling filing systems, in particular it has the rather fine ReiserFS. In the next kernel series, RFS 4 will be out, which seriously kicks ass from what I've been seeing. In particular it has very high performance, esp for small files. XFS has attributes too.

I am thinking about getting a Laptop with OSX so I was wondering how OXS compares to Linux.

A quick comparison:

• OS X easy to use. Linux, not there yet, check back in a few years
• OS X single vendor, Linux multivendor
• OS X good hardware integration, but not much range in terms of machines you can buy, Linux will run on anything, not so good hardware integration.
• OS X expensive, Linux cheap
• OS X brand name software, usually high quality, most of the important stuff made by Microsoft, most software relatively expensive, Linux no branding at all, no MS software, practically all software is free speech/beer.

But the most important of all, OS X is proprietary and has all the lockin nastyness you'd associate with Windows, Linux is free. Nuff said.

Re:a bit offtopic, but

[A_Non_Moose]

(/Off topic whining)
What was it with the flamebait mods today? I got one for *my* opinion + experience...{shrug}
(/off topic whine off)

On topic:
Excellent to get a JFS on OSX, finally. I let out a "whoo-hooo", but what do you want from a geek. Eh?

The only thing no one has considered/mentioned is that to gain that speed hit back, you'd probably put in a faster scsi drive, right?

Some people might recall that Adaptec has/is/was dropping mac support (boo!) and while I have an ATTO card in my Mac attached to an 18G Cheeta, well, OS9 does quite well on it...OSX does a less than thrilling job {speedwise}.
So far everything seems to point to OSX or its SCSI/ATTO drivers. (bummer)

Insult to injury is:
{oversimplification warning}
From a storagereview.com roundup says, in effect:
IDE ='s write performance (workstation/home use}
SCSI ='s Read performance (server/raid)
Makes sense when you think about it, so it might be a good idea to get an IDE raid card and do a raid 1+0 to minimize or cancel out the speed hit and keep some integrity.

With so many "Good Things (TM)" coming to OSX, the computing world is going to get very interesting, I think.

(/me crosses fingers for Power4 Macs...now THAT would be a PowerMac!)
.

Re:a bit offtopic, but

[KH]

what other important features has OSX that Linux has not.

How can geek switchers forget about this?

emacs key-bindings everywhere.

I'm sure that most linux users like the bash feature that turns emacs key bindings on by default. This applies to most (Cocoa) appls on Ma c Os X. If you type in an OS X app (that uses NSTextwhatever), many of the familiar emacs key bindings are available.

For example, I'm using Ominiweb to type this, using those key combos: ctrl-a to go to the beginning of line, C-n to go to the next line, etc. I can't live without it once I got used to it.

Re:a bit offtopic, but

[jtdubs]

Yeah, damn that "lockin nastyness."

Stupid OS X.

Basing there graphics system off such properietary API as *gasp* OpenGL. And having native support for running that un-portable proprietary Java language, whatever the hell that is.

And using that damned open-source Mach microkernel.

And that stupid open-sourced Darwin unix core.

And that acursed POSIX API (still a work in progress).

And CUPS.

And OpenFirmware.

How dare they rely on such proprietary things as firewire and usb for peripherals. And 802.11b for networking. And optional LDAP authentication. And how dare they invent new, cool, peer-to-peer automatic network configuration protocols (Rendevouz) and then open up the spec and source.

They are practically the devil.

And I love how on every point OS X wins. You agreed that it was easier to use, had better hardware integration, and better software. Plus, I think most of us agree that it's really cool tech and is prettier.

And then you say "Linux is free. Nuff said." as if this clinches it and Linux has won despite losing in every category other than price.

So, hard to use, poorly-integrated OSs with bad software-support beat easy to use, well integrated OSs with good software-support as long as they are free?

Damn that apple and their embracing of open standards.

Justin Dubs

Re:a bit offtopic, but

[jtdubs]

Damn them with their proprietary hardware that cannot be built by anybody but them (under threat of lawsuits).

Yes, how dare they try and make profit to support the further development of their OS and fund researches and UI analysts. Until you show your business model of 'give things away for free' to be successful, don't knock everyone elses.

Damn them with their entirely closed source OS above the kernel level, and what kind of madness is an "open source" kernel where they can change the conditions under which it is licensed at any time they like?

It's not closed-source above the kernel. The entire unix core is open sourced. The kernel, the command-line utilities, the ENTIRE unix core. It's a complete, free, unix distribution. The closed-source part is the GUI layer, some drivers, and some other miscellaneous pieces.

Again, show us that your business model doesn't suck and people will think about using it.

How dare they threaten lawsuits against the creator of an Aqua mozilla skin, despite everybody knowing that they themselves prove in court you can't protect a look and feel.

How dare they protect the name and look-and-feel that they invented? They actually named the linux theme "Aqua", not very subtle for a rip-off. They ARE allowed to protect the name, aren't they??

Speaking of look-and-feel, remember how well the OSS community showed off their maturity when RedHat took the OPEN SOURCE KDE and Gnome look-and-feels and unified them.

May they roast in hell for their DRM enabled (yes, it is) mp3 media player that had to be reverse engineered for the people that wrote much of their OS.

This is funny cause apple has had a LONG time anti-DRM stance. DRM on the iPod is OPTIONAL. I've never had problems putting MP3's on it. Have you?

And why is there STILL no QuickTime player for Linux, despite the fact that they use large amounts of GNU code. A lot of open source software has been ported to MacOS, but do they port anything back in return? No.

Yeah, they give nothing back. Except for that free unix distro, Darwin, and that whole Rendevouz thing. Also, GNU != Linux. Even assuming apple uses LOTS of GNU code in it's quicktime player, they are under no obligation to give back to the community. That's part of the GPL and LGPL. Plus, why linux? Why should apple devote resources to porting a Quicktime player to an OS with almost no share of the desktop market.

Justin Dubs

10-15%

[SlamMan]

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?

Re:10-15%

[toupsie]

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?

So you can have fun yanking out the power plug of your computer while its doing a write operation without the unpleasant experience on reboot. Most people (as in AOL Grandmas) don't need it but for servers, its a must. This will help beef up Mac OS X Server against Linux.

Re:10-15%

[aburnsio.com]

Journaling your filesystem allows you to maintain integrity through a system crash or power outage. This doesn't mean you'll have all the data in your files uncorrupted (a point often missed by many), but rather that your filesystem won't become corrupted (you won't lose your filesystem because of a crash). Modern filesystems like the more recent Linux etxfs and XFS and Windows NTFS support journaling. It's an essential part of keeping your computer crash-resistant.

There is a cost, however. Journaling filesystems are slower than non-journaling because all file metadata update operations have to be written to a transaction log. This makes journaling a poor choice for some high-volume filesystems in scientific computing or other arenas where performance is uttermost (games). In most cases, however, the performance penalty is worth the added integrity.

Note that journaling your filesystem only keeps the metadata intact, not the file data itself. You can still loose data, such as the contents of a document you were editing but had not saved. For full transactional integrity you need the cost and overhead of a transactional database (SQLServer, Postgres, DB2, Oracle, etc.).

Re:10-15%

[rgmoore]

Journaling means that if your system isn't shut down cleanly, it won't take forever to fsck your disk the next time you start up. The journal will contain all the information the system needs to get the system into a consistent state after an unclean shutdown. In addition, if the system journals all data instead of just metadata (as most journaling systems seem to do) it will prevent data loss, too.

Also bear in mind that it won't cost you 10-15% of your system resources; it will slow down disk operations by 10-15%, which is a much smaller penalty. If you aren't doing really disk intensive stuff, you probably won't even notice the slowdown. If you are doing lots of disk intensive activities, you'll probably like the fact that you're less likely to be hosed if your system crashes in the middle of one.

Re:10-15%

[TheMatt]

If you have ever had a Linux system running a non-journaling filesystem, you'd know. I had a box using ext2, a non-journaling fs, go down in a power failure. This baby had about 100 GB of space in ext2. It took at least an hour to get the system up because if a box crashes without journaling, it must check the drives for consistency.

In comparison, that same box using ext3, a journaling filesystem, takes a second or two to recover since it is not dependant on the size of the drives, but the (small) size of the journal (except if your drive hardware fails).

Also, journaling helps with data integrity in cases of failure as well, so you don't get files filled with garbage at the end.

If they are using anything close to BeOS's filesystem, use it. That was by far the best filesystem I have ever seen. Beautiful.

Re:10-15%

[rusty0101]

As for why Journaling matters, I recomend going to Google and asking it for the tutorial on ext3. The tutorial has links to even more depth on the issue. As a quick overview, when you edit files in most applications, the process of saving involves two steps, write data to disk, update whatever form of table is in use on the disk with what updates have been made. For example, a file now uses sectors 5200,5201, and 5209 rather than just 5200 and 5201 as it was originally written.

If the power goes out between when the data was written, and when the tables were updated, the data is effectively lost, as the system will only know about the fact that data was written to 5200 and 5201.

Journaling has several implementations, however one of the most common is to log what data is being written to the hard disk, then when all the tables are updated, flushing that information out of the journal.

If the power fails, the system opens the journal file, and starts the process of writing the data in the journal file to the hard disk again.

Why might this be worth a 10-15%? This will be different for different users, but a fairly simple (if contrived) example is if you are running a commercial web site. If I decide to purchase 1000 units of roduct XXZ from your web site, without knowing that a thunder storm is moving through your community, I place my order, get a confirmation number back, and think all is well. Unbeknownst to me, your web server dies after generating the confirmation, while writing the record to the hard disk.

If my purchase is important to your business, say for example the money has been handled as part of the confirmation, and I would not be happy about you not shipping the product I paid for, you might think it worth a 10-15% performance penalty to insure that my purchase gets recorded properly when your power comes back up.

At the same time, if you spend your time on the computer reading slashdot, playing Everquest, and crunching DES keys, perhaps journaling isn't worth the 10-15% hit.

I may be wrong here as well, but I believe the 10-15% hit being reported is for disk intensive transactions, not for processor performance.

Then again, I could be wrong.

-Rusty

Re:10-15%

[mickwd]

"Note that journaling your filesystem only keeps the metadata intact, not the file data itself".

That depends on which journaling filesystem you use, and, sometimes, which mode you use it in.

For example, the Linux ext3 file system supports three different journaling modes: "journal", "ordered" and "writeback".

From the "mount" man page:

journal All data is committed into the journal prior to being
written into the main file system.

ordered This is the default mode. All data is forced directly
out to the main file system prior to its metadata being
committed to the journal.

writeback Data ordering is not preserved - data may be written into
the main file system after its metadata has been commit-
ted to the journal. This is rumoured to be the highest-
throughput option. It guarantees internal file system
integrity, however it can allow old data to appear in
files after a crash and journal recovery.

"You can still loose data, such as the contents of a document you were editing but had not saved".

Well unless you've got some special sort of memory, you're going to lose everything you (or the application) haven't saved, whatever type of file system you use.

Re:10-15%

[ahknight]

There is no penalty for games. Games only read. The performance hit is for mass file creation and renaming and so on.

Re:10-15%

[rusty0101]

Both. It depends upon the journaling method used. BFS for example only journaled system information. User data was allowed to become corrupted because a user's data file being corrupt is unlikely to bring the system down.

If you go through the documentation for the various journaling filesystems, XFS, ext3, jfs, Reiser (sp?) others, you will find that each implementation takes a different tactic when it decides what gets journaled, and what does not.

A document you are editing, is almost never journaled, unless it is happening as part of a background save process, or as part of you saving the document to disk specifically.

Then again, I have been wrong before.

-Rusty

Re:10-15%

[Doktor Memory]

Journaling filesystems are slower than non-journaling because all file metadata update operations have to be written to a transaction log.

That isn't necessarily true. At least, not always. In a RAID environment, filesystem logging can actually result in a net performance increase, because queuing up your writes in cache ram while waiting for the journal to commit increases the likelihood that the physical write operation will get spread sequentially over all of the drive heads. See Adrian Cockroft's book for more details.

Re:10-15%

[ceswiedler]

The kjournald process is flushing the journal. This doesn't mean (AFAIK) that your filesystem is only up-to-date as of the 5s interval that kjournald last ran. When the system reboots without unmounting properly, it replays the journal to get it as up-to-date as possible (up to the last transaction that was fully written to the journal). The point of flushing the journal every 5s is to limit the size of the journal and therefore the time it takes to replay it on reboot. And quick reboots are the point of journalling.

Re:10-15%

[rgmoore]

They're not as contradictory as you think. Almost all journaling systems journal metadata only, so they only protect the integrity of the filesystem, not the actual data. There are a few systems that actually journal everything, providing protection of the actual data as well as the filesystem integrity, but most ordinary users aren't likely to use them.

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. That obviously isn't efficient, and you can still lose your data if the system crashes while you're writing it to the journal. Full data journaling only makes sense if you have another device to use as the journal- say a small but blazingly fast SCSI disk or some kind of nonvolatile RAM. That's not something that most users are going to do, but it would make sense in an enterprise environment.

Re:10-15%

[marhar]

Most people (as in AOL Grandmas)

I think this will also benefit the AOL Grandma crowd. Can you imagine their reaction upon booting up with a dirty partition and having to go into single-user mode and repair a filesystem?

Re:10-15%

[Valdrax]

I disagree. "AOL Grandmas" are exactly the sort of idiots most likely to turn off their machine by pulling the plug or turning off the surge protector the machine is on. Not to mention, they're also the people most likely to destabilize their system into crashing with bad software in the first place.

I think it should be turned on by default with advanced users, such as video editing pros, being the ones to turn it off.

Just another reason...

[toupsie]

...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.

Re:Just another reason...

[aburnsio.com]

You get away with it because you aren't banging hard at the filesystem while yanking away at your cables. Try fulling loading your system with data copies back and forth to your iPod and an external hard drive, open your Mac box, and then on full disk load pull all cables (including internal hard drive connection). Try this a few times and you may have more luck. ;-)

Re:Just another reason...

[x136]

I have never had filesystem corruption with HFS+.

You haven't been trying hard enough. :)

Although I will say that I've only had it happen once and it was pretty much my fault (and it wasn't in OS X, either.). More than I can say for FAT16/FAT32.

Re:Just another reason...

[edremy]

Got a call from one of the help desk people yesterday: he was confused about a Disk First Aid message on a Mac here.

Yep, you guessed it... B-tree was basically spaghetti: reformat and reinstall time. I've seen it happen a few times before: the most spectacular being a crash during a defrag. Basically, nothing pointed to the right file: all the icons were there, but the info in them was basically noise.

Re:Just another reason...

[dubiousmike]

People, people. I would think as Mac fans we wouldn't want to tout the Switch campaign. Do any of us here really think that it is meant to target any of us, or just the lowest common denominator that happens to have extra money to spend on a system?

Apple commercial: "I wanted to do video editing and no one could help me to do it on a PC". What a fucking moron. If you can't use a search engine, what makes you think you could edit video? For God's sake, you can buy a PC with a firewire card and some cheap editing software and BAM! you can bring your video right in.

I understand that OS X is great for us geeks, but pulease stop bringing up the commercial that HAS to be targeted at AOL users and other internet bottom feeders.

Disclaimer: i DO like macs.

Re:Just another reason...

[toupsie]

I understand that OS X is great for us geeks, but pulease stop bringing up the commercial that HAS to be targeted at AOL users and other internet bottom feeders.

And Slashdotters are top of the food chain? :) Actually there are several sysadmins that are apart of the Switch campaign. Not all of them are teenaged girls with their brains nuked out on Nyquil.

Disclaimer: i DO like macs.

Sure you do. Sure you do. If you really liked Macs, you would never, ever diss the marketing department built by Steve Jobs. Admit it! You are just a paid consultant from the Microsoft Marketing department astroturfing Slashdot. So which stock photo do you use? :P

Re:Just another reason...

[LoudMusic]

Wow dude, that kicks ass! The worst I've seen is the error where the file size is being reported incorrectly. A file showed up as some 37TB or something. Of course the OS had no idea what to do with the file, and the only way to get rid of it is to format/reinstall.

One of the nice things about Macs (old school at least) is that I could just boot from a CD and copy everything on the HDD (minus the bad file) to the server, format the drive, and copy it all back. Good as new ... errr ... old.

HFS and HFS+ have serious file corruption issues that most people don't ever see because they don't use their computer for more than web serfing and email. When you get into a business environment and really go at it full speed, the file system chokes. It's slow, resource heavy, and prone to file damage. It's a regular occurance on my 20+ PowerMacs to have to boot from a Norton CD and "Disk Doctor" the file system just to get them to boot from their hard drive.

~LoudMusic

Re:Just another reason...

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Apple commercial: "I wanted to do video editing and no one could help me to do it on a PC". What a fucking moron. If you can't use a search engine, what makes you think you could edit video?

Is it possable that they know this. But can't be fucked spending hours on the web looking for good advice and trying to decide who's right, downloading/buying different software to see which on is the best package, discovering that the new video editing card they bought conficts with their motherboard?
This person is a fucking moron because they didn't want possability of having to go through this?

BTW. Saying that someone who isn't good with the internet would also have no clue with video editing, is just plain ignorant and false.

Re:Just another reason...

[Pengo]

Hmm... I disagree.

I use my tiBook as my unix dev server for our server platform. though, we deploy onto unix, I can do 99.9% of the operations on my tiBook and as I work 50% from my home office, it's a perfect fit.. I always have my dev server with me.

I have managed thus far to achieve a few crashes, mainly due to a resource leak with file handles and also a strange bug in Java. I have had my software crash litterally thousands of times in development cycles. I have had to hard-reset because of a hard lock w/the quartz engine....

Anyway, I -abuse- this laptop (which I am typing on right now). It's has been an absolute champ. I haven't had anything go corrupt, and never had an error i couldn't recover from.

Note, that I did re-partition my drive and stuck /usr/local/ mounted with a 3 gig UFS partition, but not problems with that in the last 3 weeks.

My G4 tower (466) has been a mysql and pgsql database server and a host of my personal webserver for almost 2 years now. It survived moving over-seas twice and my abusive MP3 harvesting tools to newsgroups *gasp, I know*.

Anyway, to say that a 'real user' will experience problems is utter bullshit. I don't know what's going on with your stations but we have 5 people on the team using G4's (some laptop+tower) and we never have problems.

Re:Just another reason...

[cioxx]

Apple commercial: "I wanted to do video editing and no one could help me to do it on a PC". What a fucking moron. If you can't use a search engine, what makes you think you could edit video? For God's sake, you can buy a PC with a firewire card and some cheap editing software and BAM! you can bring your video right in.

Look, maybe you have lots of time on your hands to sit in front of google typing queries, then read pdf manuals to figure out how to use the latest Pinnacle DV Studio, then buy additional Firewire card, proceed to open your case, install it, configure settings, fetch the DV stream, make sure you fully understand VIVO interface, etc...

But, most of the people don't have time to clown around on the PC doing all that shit. Most of my friends spend less than 30 minutes on a computer per day on average. You think they give a shit? No.

Truth of the matter is, the average Desktop Joe wants everything simplified, fast, badabing - badaboom. And then return to his regularly scheduled life. Stop measuring eveyone with your ruler. Vast majority of people have higher priorities than to read technical manuals on how to edit a small clip on their computers. It's 2002. The average consumer should not fuck around with idiotic schemes just to put couple of scenes together and burn in on a CD. That's what you get with Windows.

Mac is different. They have their finger on the pulse of the population. Simplicity is what matters. And when iMovie outputs the same or better results than Pinnacle or Ulead applications, then the choice is clear. Mac is the answer.

I understand that OS X is great for us geeks, but pulease stop bringing up the commercial that HAS to be targeted at AOL users and other internet bottom feeders.

In case you missed the common denominator in the whole Apple advertising campaign, it's the simplicity and hassle-free computing. Everyone percieves the commercials differently. You just have to consider your own computer usage patterns and make the decision whether speed and simplicity is your requirement. Furthermore, the commericals are NOT targetting AOL users, or low-income individuals for that matter. No person with 12k/year salary could ever afford to buy an iPod or have a DV camera.

Thisis 100% PURE rumor

[gsfprez]

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.

Re:Thisis 100% PURE rumor

[jamesoutlaw]

Remember a few months ago when several web publishers lost their Press Credentials to MacWorld for publishing Rumors? "Nick dePlume" was one of them. Matthew Rothenburg wrote an editorial entitled "Let My People Go" (or something like that) saying that these so-called "rumor" sites should be allowed the same privileges as the "real" press. 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). I think that it's to try and lend some credibility to Think Secret and dePlume.

Of course, this is pure speculation and all. who knows. haha

Regardless of the truth, Rothenburg's "association" with Think Secret has basically caused me to lose respect for him.

Re:Thisis 100% PURE rumor

[MatthewRothenberg]

We made it very clear that we're working from sources, and that the release of this information has not been sanctioned.

Of course, I stand behind it completely, and I recommend that you check out our track record for accuracy when reporting unannounced Mac news on eWEEK: The end of Mac OS 9 booting and the rise of IBM's 64-bit PowerPC are just two recent examples of stories we nailed to the wall in advance of the official PR.

It's not my place to speak for Think Secret, but Mac stories we put on eWEEK adhere strictly to a three-source rule (and always make a point of offering Apple an opportunity to respond, not that the company often avails itself of the chance). While we'd never burn a source, we make it absolutely clear what's official writ and what's unreleased insider information. This falls into the latter camp, but that doesn't detract a bit from its authenticity.

Check back with me in a month, gsfprez, and we can talk about whether or not this story has legs. :-)

Matthew Rothenberg
Online editor
Ziff Davis Media

Re:Thisis 100% PURE rumor

[MatthewRothenberg]

>>Matthew Rothenburg wrote an editorial entitled "Let My People Go" (or something like that) saying that these so-called "rumor" sites should be allowed the same privileges as the "real" press.

James,

Actually, I wrote that "rumor and speculation" was a silly yardstick for Apple to apply to press access, since all the mainstream press sources that cover Apple (present company included) happily employ both:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,338330,00.a sp

I also said that Apple has a right (and a need) to establish a method for differentiating between the press and enthusiasts when it comes to allocating press badges. However, applying this particular measure to the small fry and not the big fish smacks of intimidation.

Press access is a privilege that Apple can extend or withhold, but if they're not going to apply it fairly or consistently, I reserve the right to call them on it.

Matthew Rothenberg
Online editor
Ziff Davis Media

Re:Thisis 100% PURE rumor

[gsfprez]

>Check back with me in a month, gsfprez, and we can talk about whether or not this story has legs. :-)

while it may have legs or not - that doesn't change the fact that it is, in fact, rumor - and not solid facts coming from the 1 Infinite Loop Compound.

Therefore, it doesn't change the fact that the /. report that "Apple: MacOS X to Get Journaling FS" is not an accurate way to announce this news.

"Apple: Mac OS X rumored to get a JFS in 10.2.2" - which is what your report is - would be far more acurate, and acceptable of a title.

It also doesn't help to involve yourself with someone who is only slightly more accurate than Ryan Meader. While nothing is as bad as MacOS Rumors - which is only slightly less accurate than CrazyAppleRumors, you might do well to re-examine the useless Ryan Meader-esque drivvel Think Secret has given us in the past...

- the amazing iPad - which was such an amazingly horrid case of egg-face that they've deleted every possible history of it on their site

- G5s since may of 1999(http://www.thinksecret.com/archives/0599.html )

- Mac OS Lite on a Palm-like device since june of 1999
(http://www.thinksecret.com/archives/0699.ht ml)

I could go on... but i think that my basic point is that if you're going to lecture people on sexual harassment, you don't have Bill Clinton co-write the material with you - it diminishes your credibility, regardless.

i do give marks to eWeek for their news on the Mac - its fairly unbiased compared to other tech news outlets like c|net - and i do note that the actual article at your website does clarify clearly that this is, indeed, rumor, and not Apple Computer making an announcement.

so - while it seemed like a slam on you and eWeek, it was more of a slam on /. and Nick dePlume. My apologies for not being more clear.

Re:10 - 15% ?!

[Gannoc]

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.

Re:10 - 15% ?!

[MaxVlast]

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.

About that performance hit ...

[benedict]

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.

Re:About that performance hit ...

[Bastian]

Since about 90% of mac users won't ever put a second disk in, and there isn't even room in an iMac for a second disk that I know of, I'd imagine they are only talking about on a single disk.

Re:About that performance hit ...

[the_rev_matt]

I would disagree, as most Mac users I know have at least 3 disks in their towers and I have an external (firewire) drive on my iMac. This is only my experience and may be abnormal, but given the heavy use of Macs in multimedia (with the accompanying monstrously large files) I seriously doubt it.

more than just a pretty face

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:10 - 15% ?!

[Faggot]

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.

Can this be rolled back into the BSDs?

[Hairy_Potter]

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?

Re:Can this be rolled back into the BSDs?

[90XDoubleSide]

This will probably have its source released as part of Darwin (simply because it's a low-level function; I don't have any news about this), but it will also probably only work on HFS+ filesystems, so someone else would still have to adapt it to other filesystems to add it to the other BSDs.

Re:Can this be rolled back into the BSDs?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Hmm, Nazi-esque? I can see the conversation now..

Nazi SYS5 init architect:

Mein Furher! Ve needen maken startup of system harrrrrder to administrrrrate. Ist too eazy now. Even girly non-blue eyed non-Aryans can administrate serrrrvers now.

SVR4 Nazi Furher:

Ja wohl!!! How can we skrrrrrrew de administrrrrators?

Nazi SYS5 init architect:

split ze starrrrtup scripts, makingkt dem more komplicated.

Umm, I don't think that happened. I find SVR4 style easier. Every service in it's own seperate file. Ever try to start a system server on BSD by hand? It's harder than you think. In SV$ land, I can take any server down by running a kill script and restart it by running its startup script. hell, even FreeBSD has a SVR4 style init directory (granted, only for a single run level now). And if it's all that hard, just make /etc/rc3.d/S99local and run your stuff form there. RedHat (and probably most other Linuxes) have runlevel editors that make administration pretty easy.

Hmm, Berkeleyness of Berkeley software, who knew?

FreeBSD (maybe all {Free,Net,Open}BSDs) uses SoftUpdates, which in some ways is better than journalling, depending on what you want.

Re:10 - 15% ?!

[Lewisham]

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.

so when you unmount...

[Hooya]

do you get an "Elvis has left the building" message?

Re:so when you unmount...

[cygnus]

fsck failed. "I'm all shook up."

But will it Blog?

[Gorm the DBA]

yeah, yeah, yeah...Journaling is sooo 1990's.

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?

Re:Disk Space.

[Soko]

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? :-P~~~~~~~~~~~

Get a clue, bud - journaling file systems were integrated with _all_ modern OSes for a reason. Namely, big gain, near zero cost.

Soko

Questions for CmdrTaco...

[webslacker]

Rob, what kind of laptop is it?

And will you be writing a review of OSX and Apple laptops in the near future?

Re:Questions for CmdrTaco...

[berniecase]

He already did. Looks like he likes it, for the most part.

Re:Disk Space.

[Loki_1929]

"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.

I am too, however...

[BoomerSooner]

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.

Re:I am too, however...

[ahknight]

I don't think beige boxes are the target market for this. I'm imagining this running on a RAID 5 setup with Xraid later this year. I wouldn't use this on just one little drive at home...

As for disabling it, read the article. It's not even on until you get into Terminal and turn it on.

Re:I am too, however...

[jonadab]

Giving up my change to use my 2 remaining mod points in this
thread by posting...

> If it takes a 10-15% performace hit that is significant on
> older hardware.

That explains why it's switched off by default, I expect. Some
people in some situations will be glad to take a 15% performance
hit for the benefits of journaling, _if_ the journaling is of the
level of quality that is claimed (i.e., as good as in BFS). The
article says (at the end) that Apple wouldn't comment, so they
may still be weighing that, as well as the performance issue.

IMO, it's good for them to give people the option. If nobody
turns it on, there's no real downside. If some people _do_ see
fit to turn it on, presumably that's because they value it.

System Error

[jbarket]

Disk Read Failure: The King is dead.

Re:System Error

[sharkey]

Apple Update Advisory: "Buffet Overflow Condition Found In Elvis Filesystem"

Yeah.. but..

[jbarket]

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.

Re:Apple == Microsoft

[jkujawa]

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.

Re:Apple == Microsoft

[Silverhammer]

Blockquoth the poster:

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.

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...

Re:10 - 15% ?!

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.

Apple != Microsoft

[Corvus9]

Sing it comrade! It's not like Apple has ever released any of their OS as Open Source.

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!

Re:Apple != Microsoft

[justsomebody]

So, where do I download source for Aqua?

Ups, and Darwin isn't supporting my hardware, damn. But then again Darwin itself is just as usable as DOS prompt from desktop view.

Re:Apple == Microsoft

[knife_in_winter]

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.

Re:Apple == Microsoft

[hondo77]

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.

Re:Apple == Microsoft

[Gizzmonic]

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!

Re:Case sensitive

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.

FYI -- This isn't meant for you

[MidKnight]

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

I wanna see CmdrTaco on TV

[js7a]

Apple would be positivly stupid not to immediatly fly Rob Malda over for a "Switch" spot.

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"

Re:I wanna see CmdrTaco on TV

[Anonymous Coward]

"I was compiling this SMB client ... on the PC... and it was like BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP. And then... like... half of my code was gone. And I was like... nnngh? It devoured... my code. It was really good code. And then I had to write it again and I had to do it fast so it wasn't as good. It's kind of... .... a bummer. I'm Rob Malda and I crash websites by posting them to Slashdot."

tee hee

Answer unclear, ask again.

[El_Smack]

Do I see an Apple "switcher" ad featuring CmdrTaco in the near future?

Re:Answer unclear, ask again.

[zaren]

That could actually be an interesting marketing move on Apple's part - one of the guys that runs a (dare I say THE MOST) highly visible geek web site, switching?

Not only that, but it'd be a few more bucks in Taco's pocket for being in the ad :)

Umm... no.

[tgd]

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.

Re:Swap performance

[GMontag451]

ive never used osX but if it's like linux swap space has it's own partition.

OS X isn't like Linux in that respect. The swap file resides on the main partition.

Re:I should hope so

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.

Oh nos! CmdrTaco a SWITCHER!?

[2nd Post!]

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!

Cross Platform FS (Mac/Linux/?)

[peel]

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.

We need better tech writers

[Wesley Felter]

A journaling filesystem does not "provide corporate Mac sites with a new, historical view of their data"; all it does is increase reliability.

Quite to the contrary

[g4dget]

A journaling file system is actually primarily useful for laptop users: it insulates laptops and external devices on laptops from power failures and other things that happen to laptops.

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.

Swap Partition HOWTO

[red5]

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.

Re:Honest question

[g4dget]

Because it means that file name equality translates into file identity; not having that guarantee complicates software in subtle ways. Besides, how do you propose to generalize that to other languages? Are file names written in katakana and hiragana identical? What about file names written in kanji and the same file name spelled out in hiragana? File names using the same Chinese and Japanese character?

Furthermore, yes, software does rely on it. Even just untarring a UNIX archive on OS X can break it, like if it contains "Makefile" and "makefile".

Re:I should hope so

[Atzanteol]

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.

How it works...

[emil]

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.

Better than NTFS how?

[rabtech]

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.

ElvisFS?

[Anonvmous Coward]

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.

Re:Apple == Microsoft

[IamTheRealMike]

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.

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.

HFS+ explained in detail

[anarkhos]

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.htm l

Re:10 - 15% ?!

[fgodfrey]

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.

Impatience

[gabe]

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.

It rurns out that...

[RatBastard]

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.

Re:10 - 15% ?!

[GlassHeart]

The hard drive is the bottleneck of modern PCs. Making them slower slows the computer down noticeably

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.

Re:Whoops! I thought it said on by default.

[Cadre]

That being said I run OS 9.2.2 on it and it's faster than hell (10.2 was creeper slow)

Yup, and if OS 9.2.2 ever gets too fast for you, just remember to hold down the mouse button and it will stop and let you catch up.

Re:Swap performance

[GMontag451]

It is apparently possible to put the swap on its own partition by fiddling with rc, but it is kind of pointless. The OS X swap file is dynamically allocated, so most of the time, the rest of that swap partition will be sitting there useless. It does prevent swap fragmentation, but with more than 256 MBs of RAM, this really isn't an issue.

With a journaling filesystem, it may become more of an issue. It would still be a performance vs. disk space trade off though.

Why AOL Grandmas need journaling

[dmoen]

Most people (as in AOL Grandmas) don't need it

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

Re:Why AOL Grandmas need journaling

[toupsie]

I know of one AOL Grandma who has only one troubleshooting strategy: she power cycles her iMac whenever she has a computer problem.

Unless she is yanking the cord out of the wall, that will not happen. The power switch on the front of the iMac will prompt her on the screen if she wants to shutdown, restart or cancel. That's the nice part of owning a machine where the OS and the hardware come from the same company. Little things like that are thought of and integrated. If you are really worried about Grandma's iMac, just put a note on the bottom of the 15" LCD screen that says, "Grandma, don't yank out the power plug or I won't come over to Thanksgiving!!!" and she'll be set.

Think Secret's Record Speaks for Itself

[Nick dePlume]

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

Journaled File system a welcomed step

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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/USENIX _2 000/

-Diganta

Blah blah BeOS blah blah.

[rice_burners_suck]

Dominic is a good guy, but... WHY THE HELL DOES THIS NEED TO GET DONE?!?!?! All they need to do is use BSD's very own UFS with SoftUpdates!!! That code has been perfected ages ago in BSD and it WORKS GREAT, with NO performance penalty!!! 10%-15% performance penalty... Bah, humbug. At least in BFS the disk access was such that you could barely hear the hard disk head jumping around. (I am still convinced that hard disks holding a BFS filesystem will last MUCH longer than one holding a crappy DOS or HFS+ or whatever.) Unlike in Windows where it practically wakes up the whole neighborhood.

Oh yeah. And BeOS still rocks, even though it is LONG DEAD! LONG LIVE THE DEAD!

Re:"More modern framework"?

[aburnsio.com]

What I mean by "modern" is "modern design, e.g. designed with modern features (such as journaling)", not necessarily "modern implementation". It seems that HFS+ was just an extension of HFS, not a complete rewrite for OSX, and so you're just hacking on top of a hack. It seems that integrity, reliability, and speed of the filesystem would be better if they started from scratch and designed a completely new, OSX-centered filesystem rather than extending HFS+ which is really MacOS9-legacy.