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ZFS For Mac OS X Source Code Available
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."
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. ;-)
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.
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.
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
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.
No it isn't. You're just misunderstanding the semantics of ZFS.
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 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.
Just plain not reporting errors is a bug. ZFS asynchronous write semantics is intentional, although counter-intuitive, behaviour.
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.
If you want to talk to Reiser, visiting hours are 9AM-5PM on weekends.
CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
I know it may be unheard of to those reading /., but Noel is a girl.
Well then, what does Paris Hilton think of this?
Paris Hilton? Think?
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").
Noel is a she. I met her last year soon after Apple hired her away from Sun.