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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."

10 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. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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

  5. 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."
  6. 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.

  7. 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.

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

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

  9. Actually, by antijava · · Score: 5, Informative

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