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Apple Looking at ZFS For Mac OS X
Udo Schmitz writes "Apples Filesystem Development Manager, Chris Emura, is looking into porting Sun Microsystems' file system ZFS to OS X. At least this is what Sun's Eric Kustarz states on the ZFS mailing list. Is this a glimpse of hope for all those of us who think HFS+ isn't up to par for a 21st century OS? Next thing you know and they'll rewrite the Finder ..."
There are many reasons why Apple might be looking at ZFS. Only one is that Apple intends to actually make Mac OS X use it as a home filesystem.
Now, here's a reason the write-up author didn't think of: Apple is rumoured to be working on a virtualization layer for OS X, with the intent being that OS X will run in parallel with multiple operating systems. Even if that rumour is false, it's clear that with BootCamp, Apple is taking the idea of Macs running multiple operating systems (albeit not at the same time...) seriously. Solaris and GNU/Linux are the two most popular Intel platforms save for Mac OS X and Windows.
Isn't it more likely that Apple wants Mac OS X its multi-OS Macs to "just work" with the other operating systems, able to achieve a high degree of interoperability without forcing the other platforms to support HFS+?
I'm not saying a move to ZFS would be a bad thing, though it doesn't, so far as I can see, support arbitrary metadata so it'd be as practical as UFS in its current form, which is barely used by Mac users. I just think a port of the main Solaris file systems is, in practice, something Apple would be doing anyway, as part of the Intel OS-agnostic direction they're going in.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I just wish we could come up with a network file system that's worth the trouble. Right now, I'm using a Linux server with three Macs (two Tiger, one Panther), and everything is over NFS. Most of the time, it works fine, but if there's a weird hiccup, then the Mac will freeze solid and has to be hard power-cycled. Also, some apps simply won't run from a network share (or they'll run, but one thing or another won't be right). Install that app to a local drive, and it works fine. And this isn't even to mention security issues.
/Server/Shared or /Server/Apps.
I've looked at AFP, but that essentially mounts the remote system as if it were an external drive, and assigns everything to the logged in user, so ownership, permissions, etc., are all really screwy. Plus that gets even worse if you use fast user switching -- now two people are independently trying to mount the same network drive, each claiming to own it outright. And it doesn't look as seamless as, say, simply going to
SMB isn't much better.
There's always AFS, but that's so bloody complicated that I'd take a lot of convincing before I seriously considered it.
This isn't even to mention the problems that most apps have in working in a networked environment -- applications simply aren't designed for, say, networked home directories, and *especially* aren't designed to be running simultaneously on multiple systems. So if I've got Mail.app running in the den and I log in upstairs to check mail just before I go to bed, things could get messed up.
I'm not sure there's even been a new network file system since the mid 90's, has there? Certainly, nothing with broad support that fixes some of these issues? All I want is UNIX filesystem features -- simple locking (I guess), owners, regular permissions. Doesn't even need to do ACLs. Transparently mounted so it looks like it's part of the local filesystem. And at least reasonably tolerant of network glitches, so a momentary drop at the server (or whatever else happens to screw NFS connections to the wall) doesn't put all apps which have even heard of the mount point into an uninterruptible kernel-level deep-freeze (what's the point of kill -9, dammit?). Is that so difficult?
Even so, all of the other features of ZFS are worth much more than this. If Apple is anything more than a consumer widget company now, ZFS should definitely be under consideration.
ZFS is far from "just another filesystem," and comparing it to existing filesystems indicates a lack of understanding. Take a look at this presentation for more information.
Quite to the contrary! The most unreliable element in your laptop is your drive. It will fail at some point, have no doubts about it. ZFS will detect silent failures through its checksumming.
ZFS also makes it possible to do super-fast backups to external disk. Combine that with snapshots and you have the kind of data security enterprises pay a whole lot of money for. Here's how it works:
See? It can be that simple. And there's more:
So what if ZFS does things that VMS did. No-one else has made anything quite like the summit of cool stuff that ZFS is. Apple makes a living bringing cool stuff together and making it cooler. It's a natural match :)
ZFS would yet again boost OS X's position as ultimate laptop OS. Here's hoping that Apple does implement it.