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."

Comments

Re:cool..

[aztracker1]

answered my own question... cool.

From OpenSolaris License
3.6. Larger Works. You may create a Larger Work by combining Covered Software with other code not governed by the terms of this License and distribute the Larger Work as a single product. In such a case, You must make sure the requirements of this License are fulfilled for the Covered Software.

Demo

[ValiantSoul]

Watch a demo of it here: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/demos/ basics/
They create 100 file systems in 20 seconds! Amazing!

Impressive

[RAMMS EIN]

I'm impressed. Some real innovation in filesystems, and coming from a company some considered to be sinking.

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 (/, /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.

``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. ... full 64-bit file offsets''

Heh. I guess 64-bit isn't arbitrary anymore? /smug-lisp-weenie-mode

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.

Re:Impressive

[Electrum]

One benefit of partition-bound filesystems vs pooled filesystems is that a "runaway" filesystem that fills unexpectedly can't choke a separate filesystem.

You can limit the size of a ZFS filesystem (partition) to avoid the problem you describe. But when when you really do need more space, you're not limited by the initial partition size. Being able to resize partitions is very useful.

Some links

[ChrisRijk]

Man pages and a PDF slide show convering of the more interesting points:
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_to _ufs_performance_comparison
(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=demons trating_zfs_self_healing

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_s aves_the_day_ta

Some background on RAS in file-systems:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/relling?entry=zfs _from_a_ras_point

ZFS vs Veritas for simplicity:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/timf?entry=zfs_is _that_it

You can config ZFS from a browser too if you want:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/talley?entry=mana ge_zfs_from_your_browser

How to trash your OSs with benchmarks:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bill?entry=zfs_vs _the_benchmark

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_ boot