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ZFS For Mac OS X Source Code Available

Posted by kdawson on from the go-ahead-make-a-really-big-file-system dept.

nezmar writes "Noel Dellofano, who is part of the ZFS development team at Apple, has a post on Mac OS Forge announcing a late Christmas gift: he is making available binaries and source code, plus instructions, of the ZFS filesystem for Mac OS X."

22 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Notes by asparagus · · Score: 5, Informative

    I installed this last week, got it working. It's still very early beta, managed to crash my machine half a dozen times before deciding to wait a little. Remember to do zpool exports before you eject external hard drives. But yes, very promising technology. OS X has gone from having a wonky 1/0 implementation to having one of the better software raid systems available. Back to scoping out four and eight drive usb sata enclosures and cheap 500gb hard drives. ;-)

    1. Re:Notes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Well, if your looking for cheap HDs. Here is a GREAT script a guy wrote.

      http://forre.st/storage

      It works with newegg.com to find the best deals on HDs

  2. When do they say, "Just Kidding!" by osgeek · · Score: 4, Informative

    This reads like a nerd's unsubstantiated wet dream.

    An absolutely, positively, amazing feature set. I can't wait until it's stable enough for production use. After 7 years of staying away from Apple products, I'm going back to the Mac.

    --
    Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
    1. Re:When do they say, "Just Kidding!" by larry+bagina · · Score: 4, Informative

      ZFS is also available in FreeBSD 7 and OpenSolaris (which should be the most stablest of all).

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  3. Re:Hmm by wootest · · Score: 5, Informative

    Since Apple employs Noel Dellofano, hosts Mac OS Forge, has incorporated the stable read-only bits in the latest Mac OS X Server and makes a slightly older build of the same code as the Mac OS Forge read/write version available on their developer web site, I think they approve.

  4. Re:Great new filesystems by mcowger · · Score: 4, Informative

    Consider my comment some of that.

    I've had no problems with 5T+ datasets, and we even get about a 10-20% performance boost out of it compared to UFS.

    snapshotting & all those neat features work totally as expected.

    Only minor issue I see is that a zfs send is single threaded, so you cant parralellize it over multiple processes easily.

  5. Re:The real questions are... by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Informative

    a readonly version is included with leopard:

    sh-3.2# zfs
    Read-Only ZFS Implementation
    missing command
    usage: zfs command args ...

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  6. Best ZFS Presentation by this+great+guy · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have been using ZFS (on Solaris) for more than a year, both at work and at home, and I am following closely the latest developments. IMHO the best intro on ZFS is the official ZFS slides (36 pages): http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/zfs_last.pdf

  7. Re:Linux? by larry+bagina · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's not a technical problem preventing linux usage so much as a political problem and a license problem. Unless this convinces those zealots that 1) FUSE isn't good enough and 2) CDDL is FREE, it won't do jack shit for linux.

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  8. Sun CEO Encourages Apple to Use ZFS by this+great+guy · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'd say Sun looks favorably upon this.
    Of course they do. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz encourages Apple to use ZFS (direct from his blog): "As an example, Apple is including ZFS is in their upcoming "Leopard" OS X release. This is happening without any payment to Sun (that's how truly free software works). Under the license, we've waived all rights to sue them for any of the patents or copyright associated with ZFS. We've let Apple know we will use our patent portfolio to protect them and the Mac ZFS community from Net App. With or without a commercial relationship to Sun."
  9. Re:Total garbage - has no error result codes! by _merlin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Total garbage - has no error result codes! Always assumes all writes have no failures, so unplugging a firewire drive or a USB drive or eSata drive guaranteed to either kernel panic or otherwise crash the OS.

    ZFS is designed to perform writes asynchronously. If the write should be able to complete, it returns success and then goes off to do it. It's a different way of thinking about a filesystem. You need to do a "zpool export" or something before you can unplug a detachable disk to avoid the panic when you unplug it. That's not a bug. It's by design.

    The Finder itself is lied to.

    No it isn't. You're just misunderstanding the semantics of ZFS.

    This is such an amateurish implementation, I am shocked that the source was even offered.

    No it isn't. It's just not a filesystem that's suitable for the masses. Average users cannot understand or manage an advanced storage pool system like ZFS. They're better off with filesystems that make sense to them, like HFS+, ext2 or NTFS.

    Shame on Apple for funding this quality of work.

    Shame on all the geeks for telling everyone that ZFS will solve all their problems. ZFS is great under certain circumstances. It does what it does very well, but it isn't a filesystem for the masses.

    I will admit, a few years ago, DURING BOOT, linux had a similar design bug and all IDE writes during boot had no error codes returned. But this is different. This is 2008.

    Just plain not reporting errors is a bug. ZFS asynchronous write semantics is intentional, although counter-intuitive, behaviour.

  10. Re:Linux? by lokedhs · · Score: 3, Informative

    The sources has already been available under an open source license since ZFS came out.

  11. Re:The real questions are... by wodgy7 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've been running ZFS on my home Mac server since the old developer seed. It's generally stable as long as you disable Spotlight indexing on the volume (it's not supported yet). Everything on the command line works, as does accessing the ZFS pool over AFS. It's *very* easy to set up btw, much easier than setting up a RAID in Linux. There were issues deleting files from the Finder in the last release; I haven't installed the 102A release yet. Still, if you're just using it for a server volume, you'll probably be happy with it.

  12. "he is making" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I know it may be unheard of to those reading /., but Noel is a girl.

  13. Re:The real questions are... by BrainInAJar · · Score: 4, Informative

    Or more to the point, OpenSolaris... because that's where it came from

  14. Re:Port it to Linux by flyingfsck · · Score: 3, Informative

    You should reformat with XFS.

    --
    Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
  15. Actually, by antijava · · Score: 5, Informative

    Noel is a she. I met her last year soon after Apple hired her away from Sun.

  16. Re:The real questions are... by wodgy7 · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's so that you can bring a ZFS volume to any old Mac running Leopard, plug it in, and read data off it, without having to install any extra (currently beta) software.

    This is also why, when you create a ZFS pool using the read/write drivers, it defaults to creating a pool with ZFS version 6 on disk, so that it's compatible with the version of ZFS shipping with Leopard. (You run "zfs update" to transform your pool to the most recent on disk version if this kind of compatibility isn't an issue for you.)

    BTW, Leopard also reads from BSD and Solaris-created ZFS drives just fine.

  17. Re:Total garbage - has no error result codes! by Nomen+Publicus · · Score: 3, Informative

    The design of ZFS is intended to ensure that the data on the disk is _always_ a valid file system. If a system panics when a ZFS file system is unexpectedly removed, that is a different issue.

    Then, of course, checksumming everything does wonders to protect against bit rot and flaky cables.

  18. NTFS-3G on Linux is stable by Cato · · Score: 4, Informative

    Have you tried NTFS-3G? It really is very stable, no doubt due to the exhaustive testing regime on every release - see http://www.ntfs-3g.org/quality.html - and is used by default in most Linux distros. It's a different codebase to the older Linux-NTFS and Captive NTFS projects, and has reasonably good performance.

    Since ZFS is new, I don't think your scenario applies, and it's not intended for DVD/CD use.

  19. Re:Great new filesystems by iluvcapra · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here's a link explaining the parent for all you c|net "reporters" and NYT technology stringers who read slashdot. You know who you are.

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
  20. Re:linux md is grow-able, as is xfs and ext3 by iPaqMan · · Score: 4, Informative

    You should watch these. (thanks andrewg for links)

    For anyone who has not seen the ZFS demonstration videos by Bill Moore you must watch the link.

    High Bandwidth versions - http://www.sun.com/software/media/real/zfs_learningcenter/high_band...

    Low Bandwidth versions - http://www.sun.com/software/media/real/zfs_learningcenter/low_bandw...

    Also general info here:

    - http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/ds/zfs.jsp
    - http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/zfs_learning_center.jsp