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Sun CEO Says ZFS Will Be 'the File System' for OSX
Fjan11 writes "Sun's Jonathan Schwartz has announced that Apple will be making ZFS 'the file system' in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. It's possible that Leopard's Time Machine feature will require ZFS to run, because ZFS has back-up and snapshots build right in to the filesystem as well as a host of other features. 'Rumors of Apple's interest in ZFS began in April 2006, when an OpenSolaris mailing list revealed that Apple had contacted Sun regarding porting ZFS to OS 10. The file system later began making appearances in Leopard builds. ZFS has a long list of improvements over Apple's current file system, Journaled HFS+.'"
Well, not in THIS forum. But elsewhere.
/ 06/sun-ceo-jonathan-schwartz-zfs-to-be-the-file-sy stem-in-leopard
5:1 that it's not the default root file system in Leopard.
The first bootable release of ZFS (not "BUILD," but "RELEASE") isn't even due until the Fall.
I'm not alone in this skepticism. See this Ars story, for example.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/06
He's already taken it back, more or less:
"I don't know Apple's product plans for Leopard so it certainly wouldn't be appropriate for me to confirm anything. [...] There certainly have been plenty of published reports from various sources that ZFS is in Leopard, I guess we will all have to wait until it is released to see if ZFS made it as the default, or if they simply announce that it will become the default in a future release."
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Solaris having ZFS "soon"? Looks like an old link, as it's been part of Solaris 10 since last summer... My servers running it in production would be sad to hear if it wasn't...
March 28th, 2007 at 19 hundred and 50 hours Zulu time
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Its worth noting that most Sun instructors do not work for Sun. As someone who has implemented and is using ZFS, it really is as good as they say. I use it at home for storing video files and have not suffered any data loss.
Microsoft crippled FAT32 in Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Both of these can only format a 32GB FAT32 drive, anything bigger requires NTFS (or a third-party formatter). FAT32 also has a 4GB file size limit which is an issue when dealing with large avi files and DVD rips.
ZFS came out in Solaris 10 Update 2. (Sun is days away from releasing update 4.) It is currently bootable in OpenSolaris.
It still has memory hogging issues as well as performance issues in certain areas. More kernel tuning will be needed to tame the beast that is ZFS. It is good for many things but it does not replace EVERYTHING just yet.
TimeMachine is a backup tool, not really a live versioning tool. That makes having a second volume a requirement. If you don't understand that, then you don't understand what backups are for.
I already know how TimeMachine is going to work (it was part of the filesystem presentation at last years WWDC... so I know it, but can't reveal it), and unless they have completely redone that entire system (which was quite elegant), then ZFS will not bring a single thing to it. I do know how ZFS could make that all really elegant, but Apple already has it covered on HFS+.
A couple. 1) ZFS does not require a format. It takes me around 2 seconds to create a pool on a raid disk. Also true on a 500G hard drive. 2) ZFS pools (or directories/partitions if you will) can span multiple drives. 3) ZFS pools can have volumes (or drives) added to them at will. This means that if I run out of space in my music folder, I can add storage to it by adding another drive and adding it to the pool where my music folder is. Hope that helps
Sorry, but your description of the lookup process isn't right. First: lookup depends on the way directory entries are store. On UFS, it's a non-sorted array; in order to do a lookup, you need to (worst case) scan the entire directory. On VxFS, they use a hash, so first you hash the input, and then do run through the entries that have a matching hash. On HFS+, the catalog is stored as a B-tree, so you do compares to get to the right node, and then look through the node until you either find it or reach the end of the node. Second: None of those is affected by case-insensitivity. You simply do a case-insensitive compare each time. This is the difference between HFS+ and HFSX on Mac OS X: in the former, the key-compare function is a Unicode case-insensitive comparator; on the latter, it's just a memcmp. Third: your comment about "i" is a glyphing issue, not a character issue. Apple has a pretty good technote up on their HFS+ impelementation, and it describes the way the case insensitivity works. I recommend reading it.
On linux FUSE is all we can use because of the license restrictions. I use it on a Solaris box with a vmed red hat install it's not quite ready for prime time. And the licensing sucks because it won't get put into the kernel.
;) yet and I don't see any intent internally to even attempt it. as it stand I think I am maybe 1 of 8 people using ZFS on linux here. And that is only in the VM.
Which I find really deplurable , I would love to have it in the kernel.
And yeah id like an ifs driver but none exist
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
I am using ZFS-FUSE right now. On my gentoo system, many partitions are zfs, including /home, /var/tmp, /usr/share, /usr/portage, and /opt
Because I have suffered some random corruptions in the past, even with ext3 ("This mp3 didn't used to have a skip there!"), I wanted the checksumming so that I can tell when I need to restore something from a backup.
As a filesystem, it works completely, including creation of new filesystems, compression, checksums, etc. However, I've noticed a decrease in my system's general performance since installing zfs (probably due to it holding my home directory). Memory usage and mysterious CPU usage (I don't think it's checksumming) are the current disadvantages, but the author says it's still completely unoptimized.
Should you try zfs-fuse? Definitely. But right now don't expect a performance gain.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
Windows filesystem kernel API (it's called IFS - Installable File Systems) is fairly well documented, and you can get free GPL2 headers for it (http://www.acc.umu.se/~bosse/ntifs.h) or buy IFS kit from Microsoft for about $109 (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/IFSKit/def ault.mspx). Unfortunately, IFS is a very complex API and there's only ONE good book about it.
:)
You definitely can port FS to Windows using only documented API, but it's a long and tedious process. I'm currently porting FUSE to Windows, so I know it
For something that's only a year or so old (production wise), I don't trust it worth shit.
/dev/null > /path/to/file', then, once you have some blocks free, rm works (so does unlink).
We run Netbackup Enterprise on Solaris 10 - during our last round of upgrades we installed ZFS on our disk staging storage units. It replaced VxFS. The way disk staging storage units (DSSUs) work in Netbackup, the disk is always near 100% full form a unix perspective. Basically, any time more disk is needed, the oldest image that has been copied to tape is expired from disk, thus freeing up more room. However, ZFS's most prominent bug from our perspective is that during periods of high activity, if all blocks become allocated, it becomes impossible to unlink(2) a file. This causes the application to no longer be able to make space for new backup images.
Going down the shell, try to rm a file and it comes back: rm failed, disk is full.
Well, if the disk is full, and you can't rm because the disk is full, how do you free up space?
Sun's response, truncate an unnecessary file using 'cat
Ok - so how do you tell a compiled application to truncate an unnecessary file before unlinking it? You can't! How can you determine what an unnecessary file is? If you delete the image before expiring it from the catalog you get errors when you try to expire, so you end up with catalog corruption.
All in all, this is a problem that should never have been introduced, let alone still exist after months of sending trace outputs and reproducing it in multiple environments. ZFS isn't ready for the real world.
ZFS is not ready for prime time - at least not on Solaris.
I setup ZFS on some SAN storage in a new system. The internal boot disks were mirrored UFS. When one of the HBAs fried, the SAN storage disappeared - and the system panic'd.
Every reboot thereafter stopped in a panic. The ZFS subsystem panic'd the system at every boot when it couldn't find all its volumes. After calling Sun support, I found out that they need to do a massive code redesign to catch that issue, and it wouldn't be out for at least 6 months.
I'm sure ZFS will be great - once they clean up these type of showstopper bugs.
Jeremy Baumgartner
Time Machine is already fully functional (apart from a few gui glitches) in the current leopard developer builds, but ZFS isn't even available in Disk Utility (yet?). This doesn't mean ZFS won't be added at the last minute, but it certainly isn't required for Time Machine.