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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."

31 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 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.

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

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

    3. 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.

    4. 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"

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

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

    6. Re:The real questions are... by hjf · · Score: 5, Insightful

      then you need to mkfs, and if you run out of space you're screwed because you can't easily grow. also, you can't create a newer fs, nor you can have snapshots, send/receive snapshots, volumes, have on-the-fly checksumming and disks that don't drop off the array at the first read error, one-line CIFS/NFS/iSCSI sharing. Get over it... zfs is better than md+lvm+ext3+whatever.

      I'm not trolling, it's just that ZFS has been developed without the traditional and orthodox methods of disk-partition-filesystem and put everything on a single "layer", and instead of losing flexibility, we gain more, just because zfs developers were thinking outside the box (the now "traditional" way of doing things is segregation: the OSI layers, etc, claim to be more flexible, efficient and manageable than throwing everything together). I know, I know, veritas had this for years, so we could say that it was stole^H^H^H^H^Hcopied from them -- just as gates copied jobs, and jobs copied xerox.

      Imagine the possibilities of breaking traditionalisms (like linux does "socially" but not "technologically").

    7. Re:The real questions are... by Kremmy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not real sure, but you might want to ask the users of ISO9660 and UDF on optical media.

  2. 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:Notes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Based on your limited experience with this filesystem, would you say that it would make sense to port the source code to Solaris? I'm sure there's a lot of Sun users who could use a shot in the arm like this right about now.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.
    1. 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.

  6. 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.
  7. 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

  8. 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.

  9. 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."
  10. 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.

  11. That's nice. by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now, if we can only get it to talk to important things like NTFS, and Ext3, and Reiser...

    1. Re:That's nice. by Rebelgecko · · Score: 5, Funny

      If you want to talk to Reiser, visiting hours are 9AM-5PM on weekends.

      --
      CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
  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:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well then, what does Paris Hilton think of this?

  14. Re:Hmm by johnslater · · Score: 5, Funny

    Paris Hilton? Think?

  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: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.

  17. 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.

    --
    Look out!
  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: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