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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+.'"
When ZFS was first mentioned in the same breath as OS X it was pointed out that at the time you couldn't boot off ZFS file systems, so people were thinking it would power external (or secondary) timemachine devices. If it's replacing everything, I'm assuming you can now boot from a ZFS drive? When was this functionality added?
As a linux user, I have found good use for ReiserFS. However, I've been asked time and again "why doesn't my iPod work with Windows"? If they move to an open source file system, iTunes for Windows could easily include a ZFS driver. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but some sort of ZFS driver is in the Linux kernel, and Sun is open sourcing Solaris.)
I like having an mp3 player that doubles as a backup device for my important files. But some of my files are > 4Gb, so FAT32 doesn't work.
Maybe some in the know (not me) could fill us (people like me) in... Are there other benefits that will come from moving to ZFS? I'd guess that for the average consumer any performance gain, or loss, won't really make a difference, but what about those running servers or doing heavy video/audio work? Or are there other aspects of this filesystem that will make it that much better than HFS+?
Once we're sure it's stable, because it looks like a massive improvement over the 1970s-style file systems we're using now. ZFS is now part of FreeBSD, Solaris will have ZFS "soon" and many Linux distros are also considering it. Good. Let's get to a common standard that's excellent and forget the tedium of these past, less effective file systems.
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Although Apple hates preemptive disclosure, this goes right along with their "OS X is industrial grade" strategy.
;-)
All over the place Apple advertises that OS X is "Industrial UNIX at the core".
Now, with ZFS, Apple can advertise having a next-generation omega filesystem to replace the long-in-the-tooth Journaled HFS+, which was significantly better than NTFS.
NTFS versus ZFS is a joke
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We had a guy come in a few months ago to give a class on upgrading to Solaris 10, highlighting the differences between Solaris 9 and 10. When he got to the ZFS portion, he really did talk about it like that. He basically described ZFS as the filesystem to end all filesystems, the killer app that would revolutionize computing, end file corruption, and bring about world peace.
I'm not sure if that's the way they talk about it internally at Sun, but that's how their instructors portray it out in the field.
I know its not on Mac but this shows how easy and powerful ZFS is. I have heard directly from Sun that by Solaris 10 will soon have bootable ZFS either in update 4 or update 5. Remember that the big problem with Sun hardware is that they need firmware support for bootability and that it may be much easier on OS X to make ZFS bootable. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8100808442 979626078
ZFS cannot be added to the linux kernel due to licensing issues. However, there is work being done on a FUSE module for ZFS support. Though I'm not sure if it'll be worth using for anything more than accessing existing ZFS partitions.
The first bootable release of ZFS (not "BUILD," but "RELEASE") isn't even due until the Fall.
OSX 10.5 ain't due 'til Fall, either.
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That's quite a change from about a year ago, when I took the "new features in Solaris10" class; at that time the instructor I had was in no uncertain terms saying it's "not ready for production, wait until later". Apparently we have reached "later"? Or it could be that people have opinions and express them, and aren't all speaking for Sun; I suppose that's possible...
as a worker at sun and having used ZFS and playing with it constantly , it is a good File system , I appreciate the little things it has and it has brought data stability to a whole new level. I think personally that this will be a defining moment for ZFS , it will be linux ready soon ( at the same level of stability that the mac will enjoy ) and it will take off and become more of a standard for unix and linux boxes.
To bad no windows port is available. It would be nice to see my unix drives from windows.
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No, you are wrong. Going from HFS+ to ZFS would require some tricky maneuvers to get the data moved over. On the Intel Macs (actually... on Mac's formated with EFI's disk format, but these are only Intel Macs) can volumes be dynamically resized, which would be needed in this case. Even then there would be some real gymnastics involved on a disk over 50% full.
You are right that ZFS can handle volume size changes live (and HFS+ can sort-of do it), but this does not mean it is a slam-dunk. I would not want to be a product manager in charge of providing the transition code.
Aren't there still licensing issues to iron out?
Ext2/3 and ReiserFS have all been ported to Windows, so I don't see there would be any problem porting the Linux ZFS implementation as an IFS driver for Windows Vista/XP/2000
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I must have some nonstandard use case, because I've lost data with both ReiserFS (multiple times, as I optimistically tried newer versions) and XFS.
Ext3, on the other hand, has been rock solid for me.
it will be linux ready soon ( at the same level of stability that the mac will enjoy ) and it will take off and become more of a standard for unix and linux boxes.
Depends - whatcha building? An app server, a web server, a database server, or a file server? Different strokes for different folks, and I'm not clear yet if I'd like the overhead of ZFS on a database server. The jury's still out on ZFS+Oracle...
I'm not 100% on which file system I'd like. Certainly the integrity of ZFS is quite pleasing for a DBA, questions is if the overhead is worth it...
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If you were a Mac User you realize that Apple does stuff like this a lot, and they are quite good at it too.
The Move from Classic (OS 9) to OS X forced people to Recompile/Port or Die from obsoleteness modernized almost all the software for Mac OS X. This removed a lot of Old Hacky code from the code base and forced developers to follow a more modern programming style.
Next it was the move from Power PC to Intel. This once again required a full recompile but this time is assured that the recompile was with their own development tools. So more hacky code was removed and replaced with more standardized system calls.
Now with ZFS on Mac OS X it is more likely that most things will work just fine with ZFS because Apple Knows what most of the calls to the OS will be. And the bulk of the legicy code has been updated.
Windows, Linux and traditional Unix OS Devlopers don't normally Break Compatibility so often so their hacks to work around a shortfall in an OLD version of the OS holds threw to the following versions of their software on newer versions of the OS. So migrating OS ZFS on Linux is much more risky then moving to ZFS on OS X.
But it is a trade off of getting Modern Software and paying more $$$ for the software. or Pay less for the software but make it hard to upgrade to a better system in the future.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You are aware that ZFS - and, for that matter, Solaris's UFS - supports an arbitrary number of named forks in files? (Sun calls them "extended attributes", probably because that's what NFSv4 calls them, but they're really named forks/named streams/whatever you want to call them.)
Seems like Apple take some of the best ideas from the Unix world. Really shows the potential of Unix systems if the people who wrote them thought a little more about usability.
After 2 months of trying ZFS out in a non-prod environment, we reverted to UFS because ZFS was not as fast on 8k random reads and appeared to use a ton more RAM. In actuality, it used less than perceived but try explaining that to developers and DBAs. UFS will use system RAM for cache and report it as free RAM, then relase it when another process needs it. ZFS does similar things (with worse memory accounting) though if it uses system RAM for cache it reports it as used. A bug had to be squashed in ZFS regarding purging pages of cache when the system requested it back, because it would page out faster than it could account for doing so and cause massive thrashing in RAM. That has been fixed, however.
Apple has traditionally been in favor of forcing devices, such as not putting arrow keys on the original Mac keyboard.
Their philosophy tends to be of a benevolent dictator like Linus. Apple is going to make you do some things, and it's for your own good. If you're not happy with it, usually you can do something else if you have the technical skill, or you can just go get a Winders box. This has meant Apple's been able to do things no other company could, and is also why, IMO, they're the top of the heap for consumer OSes.
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From what I understand, the API that Windows filesystem drivers interface with is an undocumented nightmare that's entirely different (but not necessarily 'worse') from the way the rest of the world does it.
So porting a filesystem as complicated as ZFS could take some time.
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Sun's patents prevent a compatible reimplementation of ZFS from being imported into the Linux kernel, so you won't see that, either. The most we'll get is a CDDL-licensed FUSE module. And that sucks.
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Really?
NTFS has data checksums to detect and repair corruption caused by any component?
You can add and remove disk space from an NTFS volume dynamically?
NTFS does data-level journaling not to mention without the overhead of multiple writes of the data?
NTFS can use compression without getting horrible fragmented or other negative side effects?
NTFS snapshots do not affect performance of the normal system?
NTFS has variable block sizes?
NTFS is open source and took less than a decade to get support on multiple systems?
As far as I know that's a big no on all those. I mean NTFS is very complex and has a lot of bullet points, but to claim that ZFS is just 'ntfs with larger address space' is really missing the boat.
they shocked us when they did it off the 10.4 base.
It did not shock those of us who know that NEXTSTEP was transparently portable to at least four architectures.
you had me at #!
NTFS in Vista answers yes to all those, except the open source / multiple systems one obviously.
-Steve
A video of guys showing off features of ZFS with USB sticks is available at:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=1zw8V8g5eT0
There's an english translation available for that somewhere.
ZFS can do a lot of things with ease that other file systems either can't, or it takes quite an effort.
Actually he proved it with some cool math. Basically there is a certain amount of entropy which must be overcome to initialize a bit of data, multiply that small amount of energy by the number of bits in a 128bit filesystem and you get enough energy to bring all of the earths oceans to a boil. It was one of the best examples for the scale of large numbers I've come across.
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