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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?
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.
technical writing / development
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.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
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.
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
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.
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.
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.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.