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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+.'"
But they killed that project.
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
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?
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)
Not anymore, it ain't... Now, Apple will go with NTFS just to spite them...
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Jobs is probably not happy about his thunder being stolen right before for the June 11th keynote
I strongly doubt he didn't know about it. This is Jonathan Schwartz, not a OS X rumors blogger. At any rate, ZFS in OS X is Sun's thunder; Time Machine is Apple's thunder, and that's already announced. How many OS X users (other than slashdot readers) will care in the slightest about the underlying filesystem? What they care about are the features, like Time Machine, that it enables.
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
I think Slashdot would benefit from adopting some of K5's approach to story submissions. The Firehose is a great start, but instead of simply saying yes or no, users should be able to give feedback to the submitter. The summary for this article is a great example. The submitter typed "build" instead of "built," resulting in an annoying distraction in an otherwise concise description of the story.
Newspapers have Copy Editors (at least they used to; most seem not-too-bothered by spelling these days). It would be nice if interested Firehose users were given the opportunity to help make sure the summary was fit for publication before it hits the front page.
I guess this should have been a journal entry, but it seemed like an opportune time to bring this up.
I don't care why you're posting AC
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.
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
You misunderstood him. He said that it would bring about "War and Peace", not world peace.
Every ZFS volume has a copy of the Tolstoy classic embedded for internal benchmark purposes.
He wrote 'data loss', not 'wife loss'.
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.
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.
Apple is "well known" for massive backwards compatibility updates... except they aren't... They always handle transitions over a couple of versions, intelligently bringing people along. They swapped processor architectures twice and each time brought people along with emulators, in the Intel case it wasn't faster than the fasted G5 machines, but those of us upgrading 3+ year old machines (Powerbook G4 1Ghz -> Macbook Pro in my case) found our PPC apps running faster and Intel code flying.
We all expected the Intel migration to happen with 10.5, they shocked us when they did it off the 10.4 base.
While they did abandon Mac OS to move to OS X, they provided a migration strategy (Carbon) and a compatibility layer (Classic). Classic support shipped with 10.0/10.1, 10.2, and was supported in 10.3 if you already had it, as well as 10.4 I think, but they kept classic for around 5 years, which gave everyone time to migrate to Carbon. Its unfortunate that there is no long-term Classic via Rosetta just from a classic application point of view, but they didn't leave anyone in the lurch.
I expect 10.5 to introduce this OS, which will be useful for new installs, or for external drive arrays, especially for the Video market, but I wouldn't expect it to be the default. OS X has supported a Unix filed system, but defaulted to HFS+, because HFS+ was compatible with Mac OS, so you could dual-boot OS 9 and OS X for a good 2 years on new hardware to maintain compatibility. If they hadn't done that, they would have lost the Pro-Audio and Pro-Video markets that took a few years to get native OS X applications.
Getting it in the wild and for professionals would help that market, while not breaking ANYONE's compatibility. Sometime in 10.5's lifetime they may ship new computers with it, or they may wait for 10.6 in two years. But giving everyone two years is plenty of time to get utilities and applications compatible with the new file system.
The flashy consumer features are touted for the OS, but the underlying architecture has always followed a 2-cycle release. If you've used OS X Server for 10.2/10.3/10.4, you'd notice that they introduced stuff in one version with limited exposed functionality (with the rest via the Unix layer), enhanced the functionality in the next rev, and polished thereafter.
The Apple Mail Server -> Cyrus migration was someone poorly handled, but mostly because AMS was garbage. But the 10.4 Mail tools are night and day beyond the 10.3 ones.
They are actually far more careful than people give them credit for.
The different is, they don't keep backward compatibility as a long-term goal, they do a two-stage migration, giving people 2-4 years to transition.
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
Nope. ZFS WAS going to be the file system until Sun's CEO leaked it before Jobs could announce it. No one knows what it will actually be NOW. Jobs would rather use FAT32 than let someone leak info about one of his announcements.