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ZFS Set To Eventually Play Larger Role in OSX
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."
Macs are really going to stink if Apple changes their default operating system to ZFS. ZFS is a file system.
end-to-end data integrity
You can't talk about end-to-end data integrity when this is just a filesystem. It's only one tiny place where the data you store in said file system can wreck its integrity. Are there memory bus or in-memory check for integrity of data read from ZFS? What about applications?
Also stop talking to ZFS. Very secret internal sources told me ZFS was supposed to be a bigger event in Leopard but Steve killed it because Sun scooped him. It has happened before folks!
Don't scoop the Steve. You scoop the Steve and business is over.
This is awesome and I knew there had to be something more interesting behind Time Machine. While I'm not that impressed with how it appears it's going to work in 10.5, later versions of OS X, with full ZFS support, will make Time Machine damned near magical.
It gives new meaning to the term 'Killer App'.
BSD and Solaris have compatible licenses. So new tecchnologies developed in either can potentially migrate to the other. That is, of course, the point of Open Source isn't it?
A filesystem isn't a kernel, so leaping from the incorporation of ZFS into Darwin to a replacement of Mach and/or the BSD bits with Solaris is a bizarre one.
Non standard tools and such
Uh, Mac OS X is certified standard UNIX. Solaris is also certified standard UNIX. And they're both fully POSIX compliant.
What are some examples of non-standard tools?
Alright, who broke the comments? Seriously, I'm stuck in this "new" version and it doesn't make fuck-all of any sense to me.
Unless I'm mistaken, this will mean the true end to resource forks on the MacOS. 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. This part of the file was only supported under the HFS and HFS+ filesystems, meaning the resource fork would get lost if you copied a file to a non-HFS/HFS+ filesystem (this is why files copied to FAT filesystems in the old days often wouldn't reopen on a Mac. It also explains the "Mac OS X" folder with underscored-dot files from archives created with OS X's built-in zip utility). With OS X, Apple rolled the resource fork into the "data fork" portion of the file, meaning the information was still there for legacy purposes. However, this is only supported under apps that know where to find the information. This change has the potential to cause some headaches for shops that have legacy files spanning several decades. OTOH, I'll be glad to see it finally go...
This guy's the limit!
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.
The AppleInsider article is largely vacuous...
Please do not bother with this debunking (via Macjournals) unless you are truly interested. Thanks.
http://www.macjournals.com/news/2007/10/04.html#a79
I'm hoping not, since many things behave very oddly on Solaris. Non standard tools and such, but it would be one way to keep it from running on cracked PC's.
2 cents,
QueenB. Please go and stare at this page for a while: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
If by "non-standard tools" you mean non-GNU, yes, but they are hardly odd.
I have no idea what your "cracked PCs" comment is all about, and what it has to do with Solaris and ZFS.
killall
How many people have learned that one the hard way?
Sun is the new Bell Labs.
Watch for the robotics coming out, very quietly, from Sun in the next 10 years.
Website Hosting
What are you smokeing - what ever it is, pass it this way. Non-standard or 'does not conform to the bastardised standards which GNU have embraced and extended'. Case in point, look at the number of nimrods who assume gnu grep and use gnu specific switches for their make scripts.
It isn't Solaris that it is non-standard, it is those who insist on using GNU tools and their extensions to the standard which are the non-standard.
Hardly! ZFS have provisions for any number of "forks" in the file system, called "extended attributes" in ZFS. If Apple migrates to ZFS they have every chanse to use these attributes to provide for quite a seamless integration with previous filsystems. The file system is open source and Apple can prettymuch do what they like or need. Even NTFS have these features but MS seems to ignore them due to backwards compatability issues with FAT filsystems and Windows APIs
You know.. Wikipedia is very handy to look these things up. Please do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Way easier to manage: only 2 commands! While now with an LVM you have to place your disks in the desired topology inside your LVM (RAID0, 1, 5, ...), format them, put a filesystem on, mount, file check, repair, whatever. With zfs you place disks in your pool and kinda mount part of it, that's it.
There are some other things you could complain about: it makes less sense on hardware RAIDs with good management tools. They missed a chance to make it a distributed or clusterable file system (though they bought Lustre lately, who knows) and it's not possible to boot from it yet, but all in all it's a major step forward.
Uh... that is 'Killer.app' to you sir!
Actually, a built-in LVM makes a lot of sense if you stop to think about it; many of the things a LVM does could benefit from information only the filesystem has.
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.
Please help metamoderate.
According to the Single Unix Standard, only Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) can be considered "Unix". And only when deployed on Intel-based Macs. Previous versions must be considered like Linux: "Unix-like".
FWIW, Sun's operating system (SunOS) has been fairly close to Unix standards over its lifetime. In fact, the official version of System V release 4 was written by Sun and called SunOS 5, integrated into Solaris 2
Why is anyone even having this argument? GNU means "Gnu's NOT Unix" for a reason...
The Wizard utters the word 'frobnoid!' and cackles gleefully
You should get out more: (from the Linux manpage)
The Wizard utters the word 'frobnoid!' and cackles gleefully
According to the Single Unix Standard, only Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) can be considered "Unix".
Even conforming to the standard means that it is "UNIX" only in one sense; in terms of its internal architecture, OS X is still completely different from a traditional UNIX.
True, but the capabilities of UFS don't really exceed HFS+
In one way, at least, UFS is far better than HFS+.
The internal redundancy in UFS means that so long as the basic file system structures (directories, inodes, and indirect blocks) are intact, it can be repaired. The idea of having file system damage in a bootable file system that can't be repaired by FSCK is all but inconceivable for UFS or any of its precursor file systems. In nearly 30 years working with UNIX, once FSCK was introduced I *never* had a file system so damaged that FSCK couldn't completely restore the structure to working order. Three times now I've had HFS+ file systems require a backup and restore because of some obscure damage that even rebuilding the catalog wouldn't fix. A friend of mine is currently booting his Mac Pro off the second drive because the original installed file system was trashed.
ZFS claims "you'll never have to fsck again". That's what every journalled file system proponent says. That's what they said about XFS... until they came back with tools to do repair and you still had to reinstall to recover sometimes. I'll believe it when I've seen it in practice for a decade or so. What does ZFS do when it hits unrecoverable data in the file system structure itself?
UFS's fsck deals with it by rebuilding the file system structures so that they're valid, and tells you what you lost.
HFS+ tells you that you have some obscure catalog problem and you go out and buy DiskWarrior and hope your backups are in good shape.
XFS apparently gives you a chance to do a final backup.
What does ZFS do? The write-ups on ZFS indicate that they stop short of testing that case, and that's the most important one.