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ZFS Set To Eventually Play Larger Role in OSX

Posted by Zonk on from the all-growed-up dept.

BlueMerle writes with the news that Sun's ZFS filesystem is going to see 'rudimentary support' under OSX Leopard. That's a stepping stone to bigger and better things, as the filesystem will eventually play a much larger role in Apple OS versions. AppleInsider reports: "The developer release, those people familiar with the matter say, is a telltale sign that Apple plans further adoption of ZFS under Mac OS X as the operating system matures. It's further believed that ZFS is a candidate to eventually succeed HFS+ as the default operating system for Mac OS X -- an unfulfilled claim already made in regard to Leopard by Sun's chief executive Jonathan Schwartz back in June. Unlike Apple's progression from HFS to HFS+, ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology, but rather a fundamentally new approach to data management. It aims to provide simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability."

4 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. They said the same thing about UFS. by argent · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They made a big deal about the import of the latest UFS from FreeBSD in Panther, and their support for UFS was actually reduced in Tiger because they put the Spotlight hooks into HFS+ instead of using the hooks already in the vnode layer in Darwin.

    So don't do anything that would depend on them supporting ZFS.

  2. I maintain: by teknopurge · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Sun is the new Bell Labs.

    Watch for the robotics coming out, very quietly, from Sun in the next 10 years.

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  3. Re:a true end by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    For those of you who aren't familiar with them, resource forks were a part of a file under the Classic MacOS (OS 9 and before) that contained icon information, filetype and creator codes, etc.

    I'll be happy to see them kill that obsolete feature. It's hard to implement everything-is-a-file semantics when some things are files, and others are combinations of random amounts of metadata.

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  4. folders are even worse by SuperBanana · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Resource forks are far better than the idiotic "everything is a folder" model.

    Want to upload that Keynote project to your friendly CMS via a web browser? Can't, because it's not a file, it's a #@$!ing FOLDER. You have to zip it first. Words cannot accurately describe how tiresome this becomes.

    It also makes data recovery (should the file get accidentally deleted) nearly impossible- the files inside the folder are not named uniquely or in any identifiable manner.

    ZFS isn't nearly all it is cracked up to be- among other things, you can't expand RAID-Z...absolutely moronic. I'm not even sure you can expand a simple mirrored pool. Users have been repeatedly asking for growing abilities, and the developer reaction was "just create a larger pool and move it over". That's hilariously stupid advice given that you usually don't have that kind of storage hanging around- not even in enterprise environments.

    There's simply no comprehension amongst the ZFS developers that virtually EVERY raid card on the market supports such an operation. Even more shocking was when one developer said (paraphrasing) "gosh, how would one even go about doing that sort of thing?"

    Don't get me wrong- checksumming and automatic disk scrubbing are features long overdue, but ZFS is not magic bullet.

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