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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."

7 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. The real questions are... by slyn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How stable is it, and how soon till I can get it on my Mac by default?

    1. Re:The real questions are... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's already available on FreeBSD if you want to play.

    2. Re:The real questions are... by wodgy7 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It wasn't that easy to set up a RAID in Linux the last time I tried (admittedly long ago), but even in comparison, setting up a RAID-Z in ZFS is just a single line: "zpool create mypool raidz disk4s2 disk5s2 disk6s2"

  2. Great new filesystems by PhotoGuy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's a shame that I'm gunshy with new (to the OS) filesystems. ZFS has so much to offer, but every time I try out a new filesystem, I end up with data loss, even ones that are supposedly new and wonderful and robust. (Even when ext3 was new but stable, I lost stuff on it.) I can't wait to hear lots of positive feedback on its stability and performance, so I can get up the nerve to try it.

    --
    Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
  3. Re:Not ready for prime time... by iluvcapra · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'll bet one of the reasons they're putting it out there is the hope that a few kind souls with some time on their hands will submit some patches and work out the kinks; given the amount of interest there is for this to be working on Mac OS X -- and there's a lot.

    Maybe between Apple, some Sun devs on their breaks and Amit Singh they can have this all wrapped up in a few months :)

    Academic question: What would have happened if MS had open sourced WinFS? Even under their PL, there would probably have been enough interest among enough dedicated nerds to... who knows.

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
  4. Re:Linux md isn't rocket science...nor is ZFS raid by wodgy7 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You're mistaken. ZFS RAID-Z is definitely "raid" -- in fact it's RAID without the RAID-5 write hole on non-specialized (no NVRAM in the controller) hardware. Contrary to what you said, you *can* easily go from a single drive to a pair of mirrored drives (see ZFS admin guide, p. 59) or a RAID-Z (p. 60). The only real limitation is you cannot add an additional disk to an existing RAID-Z configuration, the idea right now being that you'll add another set of disks in RAID-Z as a top-level vdev. This is not optimal for a lot of scenarios but they're working on it. ZFS mirrored configurations are more flexible.

    The data integrity advantages of ZFS over traditional RAID-4 and RAID-5 are hard to argue with... it validates the entire input-output path.

  5. Re:Linux? by zsau · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's not a question of whether people thing CDDL is Free or not. There are "zealots" like Stallman who think that both GPL v2 and GPL v3 are free. But he would be the first to say you can't include GPL v3 code, like a future relicensed version of the Solaris kernel, in GPL v2 code, like the Linux kernel.

    And I think most people will agree with you that Fuse isn't good enough. But at the moment, there are only two options: complete reimplementation from the ground up, and Fuse. Fuse is easiest.

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