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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.
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?
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.
Are there memory bus or in-memory check for integrity of data read from ZFS? What about applications?
They have defined what they mean by that claim already: they have a checksum (256-bit, I think) on every block, and that checksum is checked from the OS when the block is read.
This will catch some errors that might otherwise go uncaught, which is important for servers that move a lot of data around.
It will not catch a memory error at the wrong time, or a processor error that stores the wrong value, or an error in the brain of the person who reads the data from the screen.
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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
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- when the Shadows descend -
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...
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