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Sun Releases ZFS

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the still-can't-beat-the-circular-filing-system dept.

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."

4 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Demo by ValiantSoul · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  2. Impressive by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
  3. Some links by ChrisRijk · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  4. Why the hell isn't this on the front page?!?! by mungtor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sun releases a staggeringly cool file system, and nobody knows about it.

    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* /. really sucks sometimes.