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Sun Releases ZFS
An anonymous reader writes "Sun's engineers have been blogging today that Sun has finally released its next generation filesystem, ZFS today by pushing out the "community" (i.e. testing) build 27 of OpenSolaris in source and binary form. There is also documentation and a a source code tour available on their site."
I must say some of the things here are absolutely cool.. the scrubber etc... I am curious if this FS will ever be available to Linux or BSD based distros, or if licensing will keep it tied to Solaris/OpenSolaris.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
About two years ago Solaris seemed doomed. Linux with the advent of 2.6 kernel started to be a real enterprise level contender. Now with ZFS and DTrace Solaris (and Open Source licencse) looks to be a real contender.
You can defy gravity... for a short time
This is incredibly good news for Sun, and yet another astounding achievement this year.
They open-sourced Solaris (despite the whinging of the nay-sayers and accusations of being in bed with SCO^H^H^HCaldera), they sell Opteron workstations and servers running 64-bit Solaris, 8-core 32-thread Niagara (aka UltraSPARC T1) came out early (the first Sun processor to do so this decade) and now they've pushed out ZFS - the best filesystem ever devised.
If only they can get Project Janus integrated and out in the open...
Stick Men
Watch a demo of it here: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/demos/ basics/
They create 100 file systems in 20 seconds! Amazing!
Check out the demo, too. We live in exciting times!
I'm impressed. Some real innovation in filesystems, and coming from a company some considered to be sinking.
/usr, /home, you know the drill), and each one will use as much space as it actually needs. I suppose you can still have / read-only, /home read-write, etc.
... full 64-bit file offsets''
/smug-lisp-weenie-mode
I love:
``ZFS presents a pooled storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions''
As far as I understand it, there is no need to decide in advance how large your filesystems are going to be. Simply make all your disks one large ZFS pool, then create your filesystems (/,
``All operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid.''
And that seems to go not just for the directory structure, but for the file contents, too.
``ZFS provides unlimited constant-time snapshots and clones.''
Another killer. Clones (writable copies, only the differences stored) are incredibly useful.
``There are no arbitrary limits in ZFS.
Heh. I guess 64-bit isn't arbitrary anymore?
I wonder about:
``if you enable compression on a swap volume, you now have compressed virtual memory.''
How about encrypted virtual memory?
Finally, I'm curious to see how this will stack up against Reiser4 in terms of features, performance, and everything.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Man pages and a PDF slide show convering of the more interesting points:
o _ufs_performance_comparison
s trating_zfs_self_healing
s aves_the_day_ta
s _from_a_ras_point
s _that_it
a ge_zfs_from_your_browser
s _the_benchmark
_ boot
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/
(ZFS itself has just two commands btw)
Some basic UFS vs ZFS benchmarks:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/roch?entry=zfs_t
(I guess we'll have to wait and see if ZFS can beat UFS on all benchmarks by the time it ships with Solaris proper)
Party trick - silently recovering forced data corruption:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/timc?entry=demon
A user example of how ZFS's built-in error detection and correction can find hardware errors:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/elowe?entry=zfs_
Some background on RAS in file-systems:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/relling?entry=zf
ZFS vs Veritas for simplicity:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/timf?entry=zfs_i
You can config ZFS from a browser too if you want:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/talley?entry=man
How to trash your OSs with benchmarks:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bill?entry=zfs_v
Can't yet be used as the boot file-system, but it's being worked on:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/tabriz?entry=zfs
The feature set for ZFS is certainly way cool. But I'm disturbed by the lack of emphasis on reliability. I've had nasty experiences with older Sun filesystems that didn't that didn't respond robustly to sudden loss of power. (Yes, there was a UPS. It's a long story.) By contrast, I've seen journalling file systems like XFS and NTFS simply laugh off that kind of problem.
OK, maybe ZFS is more bulletproof than the filesystems I relied on the last time I worked with Solaris (1998). Still, I'd like to here them say that this is an important design feature!
2.6 ? You are probably not using Slackware then :))
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
YHBT
It's good that Solaris is heating up again. Linux has this "OS for all seasons" thing going on, and needs healthy competitors in all of its areas of utility to keep things real. Competition is GOD in the software and computer hardware world -- even in the OSS world where competition and collaboration run hand in hand.
I cant wait for "the best filesystem ever devised."
It's a hand twinkler, you dumbass! And I got a bag of whoopass for you!
Sun releases a staggeringly cool file system, and nobody knows about it.
/. really sucks sometimes.
Only 25 comments too. Apparently there is a definite audience to cater to now rather than providing actual news. Mustn't frighten the linux weenies. *sigh*
On the website they say they wait for people porting ZFS to other OS.
I would hope it could be ported to linux, does anyone knows if the licence is compatible?
This looks like a very very promising filesytem!!
...now promised for some post-Vista date. I know both FS'es are not the same thing, but both are supposed to be revolutions in this field, and there are important points in common like transactional semantics and much easier administration of large volumes of data.
I tried the WinFS beta a couple months ago, and was horrified with the amount of RAM it sucks. I got close to 300Mb running only Windows and the WinFS daemons; without any application running, and without using any feature of WinFS. If the best innovation Microsoft can do is installing a full-blown instance of SQLServer disguised as a filesystem, and if ZFS does not do that (I didn't test it), then Sun is pretty comfortable in this particular competition.
also see:
m
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettabyte_File_Syste
Now when will we see it on Linux? It _is_ opensource, right sun?
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
Only DragonFlyBSD almost got it.
{{.sig}}
Okay, so lets see.. In Iron Ext3 there is a more comprehensive checksumming system than XFS. Linux already has a deadline scheduler. Reiser4 has exactly the same ripple tree structure just like ZFS which provides transactions and will (someday) make snapshots easy. About the only thing in ZFS that doesn't exist by itself in Linux already is the tight raid integration with the FS, which is debatable in it's merits.
So what Sun has really done is taken a bunch of preexisting innovations, and glued them into one completely offering. By themselves they weren't so useful, so they really have done a great thing, but it's ashame that they can now take credit for the innovation of others just because they got a complete product to market first.
This should be a sad but hope building event (to see their ideas hit production first with someone elses name) for the reiser4 folks.... Hope building because it just shows that the world really does need the tech they are working on.
For this former solaris user, the real question is when Apple will pick it up so that I can use it easily.
I am a slacker (pun intended), so, though I've been using Slackware for many years, I never found out why Pat thinks that 2.4 is better. I don't care. All I know is that the stable branch of 2.6 compiles and works perfectly.
Go Pat.
I always love competition, it is the reason why things get better..
I use to be a great Linux supporter, but now, most of the Linux supports make me ashamed..
If it isn't Linux, it __MUST__ suck. They won't admit anything else is good if it doesn't have GPL stamped on it.
I now recommend all the companies I consult with to move AWAY from linux, as the GPL will eventually bite you where the sun don't shine.
I have pushed most of them to BSD, but I'd love to have Solaris as another option.
Solaris Maturity
ZFS speed and integrity
Postgres Maturity, speed, and functionality
I look forward to doing some testing and benchmarking, and hopefully, in the not so distant future:
OpenSolaris 10 + ZFS + Postgres will be the combination I can recommend.