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Apple Removes Nearly All Reference To ZFS
Roskolnikov writes "Apple has apparently decided that ZFS isn't really ready for prime time. We've been discussing Apple/ZFS rumors, denials, and sightings for some years now. Currently a search on Apple's site for ZFS yields only two hits, one of them probably an oversight in the ZFS-cleansing program and the other a reference to open source. Contrast this with an item from the Google cache regarding ZFS and Snow Leopard. Apple has done this kind of disappearing act in the past, but I was really hoping that this was one feature promise they would keep. I certainly hope this isn't the first foot in the grave for ZFS on OS X."
cross-meme joke completed.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Could this be a Larry effect?
I certainly hope this isn't the first foot in the grave for ZFS on OSX.
More like the last nail in the coffin . . .
WIth the impending purchase of Sun by Oracle, I'm thinking it could be one of 2 things:
1) ZFS will be killed and/or de-emphasized and/or re-licensed in such a way that Apple is not comfortable/happy with putting it into Mac OS
2) It will still be ZFS just not called ZFS anymore (either re-branded or forked by Apple or re-named by Oracle/Sun)
ZFS
With most of the emphasis on performance and stability, this was probably the one "feature" I was looking forward to with Snow Leopard. At $29 I'll still upgrade. Grand Central and OpenCL sound fairly impressive but I was really looking forward to a file system that never needed to be upgraded... I guess I'll keep on waiting.
Gotta get me one of these!
Which one can you mount on Linux, MacOS and maybe even Windows without precarious hacks, and with journaling, long filenames, and maybe extended attributes? So far FAT and HFS+ without journaling seem to be about the only choices. ZFS would have been it if MacOS and Linux both ended up supporting it, but now neither of them do (without precarious hacks!)... so Solaris is off in the corner by itself again. Bah humbug.
When I dual-boot my Mac (Linux & Leopard) I'd like to have the same partition for home directory on either system. A better FS for thumb drives than FAT would be nice, too.
The situation is utterly pathetic.
The Known Issues and Features in the Works page for ZFS on MacOSforge explains the situation pretty well. Integrating ZFS into MacOSX isn't just a matter of creating a device driver. Time Machine, Finder, Spotlight and other core OS products needs to support ZFS features explicitly, since ZFS behaves a lot differently from HFS+.
Snow Leopard is about performance and optimization. A new file system would fall under new features.
I've played around with ZFS on the Mac a little bit. I've also played with ZFS at work (Sun UltraSPARC platforms) where we went from true believers to backing away rapidly (let's just say that there are certain Oracle workload profiles for which ZFS causes some massive performance hits especially when the disks are close to full).
I'm guessing that ZFS failed to meet at least one of (what I imagine are) Apple's criteria:
1. has to be simple to use
2. has to be rock solid
There's a good chance it failed at both. I'm not saying that ZFS is crap. Personally I think its a brilliant design, however it needs a bit more sunlight before its ready for the Steve.
It made sense to pre-announce ZFS to head off the competition, but now that the cards are all face-up on the table, Apple doesn't want to be seen as overpromising and underdelivering. Once iFPGA in particular is out the door, nobody will remember this delay, or any of the other political snafus.
There never was a ZFS. And Oceania was always at war with Eurasia.
If something they were planning on including changes somehow not to Apples liking, why do the control freakery thing of removing all past references to it in a vain attempt to rewrite history 1984 style? Is it not enough to just say "well, we've decided not to use it anymore, we have other plans we can't discuss yet."
People change their minds, even the almighty Steve Jobs won't get everything right (as it finally gets released) first run out. Think about the image they're trying to sell us on here, and imagine it in other contexts to see how believable it is.
A band writing and recording a song: able to play the whole thing, from start to finish, building riffs, fills, solo etc in one take. Vocals, harmonies etc all done with no practice, all in one take. Instant magic? No, it's shit. ALL bands spend ages refining stuff, getting stuff to work, playing with a riff, altering it slightly, trying variations etc to find a blend that works.
A writer sitting down to write a novel, and creating a masterpiece on the first draft. Any writer will tell you the first draft is ALWAYS very rough and will often only bear a small similarity to the final work.
By trying to rewrite history to remove all references that they were planning to use ZFS in some way and now won't is like trying to fool the world into thinking what they use instead was plan A, when it wasn't. Are Apple really this petty and small minded? Are they really so desperate to control their image of "perfection on every try"? Do they have any idea how these stunts just make them look like asshats?
I'm really not trying to flame here, but we ALL know that end products come from a LOT of ideas, some work, some don't, some work in theory until some other requirement kicks in and makes that part not work. This is a long process of trial and error, this is very natural; it happens on EVERY project, from EVERYONE ELSE, except apparently Apple.
In this case IT people will remember this latest purge of anything the Apple hierarchy have decided never happened as it is, and not IT people have no clue what a file system is, or that ZFS is one of them.
It's not as if it's an open source project where a vocal minority of IT skilled people can fork OSX and implement ZFS if Apple don't. What's the worst that can happen? Some will be disappointed until they see what Apple have up their sleeves as an alternate to ZFS which they may or may not know themselves yet. Will they abandon Apple? Not likely, Apple people tend to be very loyal and will continue to throw money at Apple for stuff. They will already have spent a fortune buying vendor locked Apple stuff, so switching to Windows or Linux will be harder. In all likelihood they wouldn't touch Windows with a barge pole as it's what sets them apart from regular PC users, and they won't have heard of Linux. So what have Apple got to lose by leaving the decision / thought processes as they happened?
Guys, ZFS is currently in the Snow Leopard Server preview, it's just not in the main desktop version of Snow Leopard yet (it'll probably come in a few months). Not only that, but there are HFS+ and ZFS drivers for bootcamp. My friend just installed Windows 7 RC on a ZFS partition with Bootcamp on Snow Leopard Server. The following screenshot is SFW http://i40.tinypic.com/xdumw0.jpg
If something isn't "good enough" to make a solid product, then don't include it. This is how Vista got whittled down the way it was. The list of features that were pulled is longer than those remaining by my estimation.
tequila really burns when it comes out your nose.
The Year of the ZFS Desktop! Oh, wait...
ZFS can store more than 2^128 different files! That is more than the particles in the entire universe! Please put back the specs apple; think about God for christ's shake
We use Mac OSX Server for our infrastructure. It's a royal PITA and I now wish we hadn't done it, but there have been a number of media companies in recent years that have moved to Mac OSX Server because all their clients are OSX.
My view is that Apple is just jealous of Microsoft and said to itself that if Microsoft can drop promised new features in Vista like the DB based file system, then why can't Apple drop ZFS? ;-)
This is VERY, VERY SAD!!! I had been comtemplating the thoughts of buying Mac OS X Server (since everyone thought it will only be on OS X Server) for my desktop/MacBook just because I want to use ZFS. Now that ZFS is no longer the reason, the price for $29 for Mac OS X will be the attractor factor to use OS X, not OS X Server.
Kevin Pan.
Is it not possible that apple is getting ready to rebrand ZFS as iFiles or something?
Or at least , its one of the operating systems certified to follow all the unix requirements and hence Sun can use the unix name if they want. In fact many moons ago you'd see "SunOS Unix" at the login prompt.
...are use ZFS on their web server?
OK, when they updated UFS in Panther I was all ^_^ because I was tired of HFS+ turning up x_x, and then they decided to make Spotlight dependent on HFS+ and I was all o_O and half the guys on Slashdot were telling me that UFS was -_+ and ZFS was coming and they were all :) over that, well guys, what kind of emoticon are you mainlining now?
ZFS is not it.
Look at its requirements. Look at the things you have to do to keep it running efficiently. Look at the memory footprint.
Of course, when you read newsgroups about any technology, you always get a negative view, because all you're seeing are the problems. And the ZFS fanboys love to point that out. Fine.
BUT, I know of no other filesystem that has the kind of problems that this one does.
Afaik Btrfs, which is roughly the Linux version of ZFS, has been started by Oracle (developers) and then embraced by Red Hat and alikes. So I'm wondering what are Oracle's plans about Btrfs after acquiring ZFS through Sun?
system halted.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%222+CEOs%2C+1+filesystem%22
If you read the linked page (from Google cache), you'll see that this feature was slated for Snow Leopard Server, not the consumer version. I do not recall Apple ever advertising fll ZFS support as a feature for the consumer verison of 10.6, and neither does Wikipedia.
(Yes, consumer 10.5 does have read-only support for ZFS from the command-line; I imagine this would be still present in 10.6. In any case, it's not like this project is a secret, as Apple has released it open-source.)
R.Mo
[ ] Not told
[ ] Pending
[X] TOLD
..where can I get the "wikify the marked text"-extension for Firefox?
ZFS doesn't make the cut for 10.6. Disappointing but there must be a reason. For one thing, 10.6 is about speed not features. So maybe ZFS still is in the works for 10.7. And 10.7 may be out sooner than we think. Maybe I'll invest in a drobo and give it a shot.
Well, I've been using ZFS for several years on several different machines with mixes of mirrored and RAID-Z configurations. Since that time, I've never lost one bit of data. It has survived power-supply failures, lightning strikes that fried the motherboard, flaky I/O cards, and human error. I understand that the implementation on Mac OS/X may be buggy, but it's not inherent to ZFS. I've several Macs doing time-machine to networked ZFS drives. It's definitely the filesystem I'd like to have everywhere.
I wouldn't be surprized if Apple dropped ZFS for BTRFS or DragonflyBSD's HAMMER, just because their license is better, because their performance don't degrade much over time and because Oracle has nothing to do with them.
{{.sig}}
Shame I just blew my mod points by posting.
But parent is completely wrong. ZFS root/boot is fully supported by Sun, and ZFS itself is used in production in thousands of installations.
you had me at #!
n / t
you had me at #!
You don't know what you're talking about, re: ZFS. You can't duplicate it on "BSD/Linux". It is not the same thing as a Linux filesystem, nor a Linux volume manager, and the architecture of ZFS is considerably more powerful than these combined. The reasons why are public knowledge, why post without understanding them?
you had me at #!
Amazing that this still has to be spelled out, isn't it.
you had me at #!
:-D
you had me at #!
Please contemplate the reason that Google recently begged and pleaded that only developers download the *developer* release of Google Chrome for Mac and Linux, and begged people not to blog and whine and bitch about its shortcomings. (They were aware of its shortcomings. It's a work in progress.)
If you want to know more about filesystems, start here:
Filesystems @ Wikipedia (Hint: the blue words are links. Click on them to read and learn even more.)
If you want to know more about ZFS, start here:
ZFS
If you want to know more about designing and building filesystems, there is an excellent discussion here (this book should be required reeading for all software developers and systems administrators, regardless of what types of systems you tend):
The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System
If you want to know more about the chief failing of the human intellect (our own limitations) start here:
Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find: They're blind to own failings, others' skills
Personally, (just between you and me, the internet, and alien archeologists a billion years from now) I interpret this finding to be scientific evidence supporting The Dilbert Principle: "People are stupid." That is to say, we are all stupid about most things, most of the time. The trick is to figure out when you don't know what you're talking about, at which point you stop talking, and start reading or asking questions.
Complex and revolutionary software systems, like good food, take time. ZFS has tremendous potential. It might not be finished yet, or Apple might take the lessons learned from ZFS and use them in a different way (HFSEFK - HFS Extremely Fraking Cool).
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
ZFS is primarily a server file system. It's meant to be used with multiple disks. Now getting it to work with USB and Firewire drives is going to take some extra effort on Apple's part. HFS+ for Snow Leopard introduces some compression features which is how Apple was able to reclaim 6GB's of disk space on the Snow Leopard install. Much of that is stripping out non-Intel architectures, and some legacy subsystems/API's but the compression shrinks the OS foot print significantly.
So unless you are running a Mac Pro with 4 hard disks or an XServe you are not likely to be using ZFS anyway. ZFS is still a wonderful file system! It's fantastic on data center SAN's and large disk arrays! It's got some really nice features. But for Apple to implement it they need more time to refine it. As others have said already, many Apple applications have to be changed to take advantage of ZFS, etc. Sun's client base has professional Solaris sysadmins setting up servers and such. ZFS was designed to be easy for sysadmins not the average joe user. Apple needs to refine it and provide automatic behavior and build some easier to use management into Disk Utility for it. Then some monitoring tools, etc.
If we see it anywhere in the future, ZFS will likely be rolled out on the next big cat OS after Snow Leopard and only on OS X Server at first. Then likely, the next OS release may incorporate it on the client. I think they took a look at ZFS long and hard and from a design and engineering perspective put it on the back burner for the next OS cycle after Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard was about optimizing what they had and refining it and sharpening it getting it ready for the future. Focus was on 64bit with 32bit compatibility and to clean up the architecture by stripping out legacy stuff. Apple made a decision to not pursue ZFS at this time, that doesn't mean they won't go back and re-address it at a later date.
I personally, don't see the average Mac user gaining all that much benefit from ZFS unless they are a sysadmin and working with big storage. The average user with large storage needs is better off buying a Drobo device http://www.drobo.com/.
Larry Ellison, the Oracle CEO. Oracle just recently purchased Sun (makers of ZFS), so the OP is postulating whether Apple pulling ZFS is a product of Cisco not working on/opening up ZFS to Apple like Sun did.
The source to ZFS (and its patents) is available under the CDDL, and cannot be revoked at this point. Future code may be hidden (once the Sun acquisition officially goes through), but currently any code out there is out there.
That was the entire point of open-source Solaris.
http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/7110/specs.xml
You can even download a simulator.
Anybody that has been out of touch for one year or more with a technology should check his assumptions first before talking....
If Apple can't use the technology I think it is their loss frankly.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Filesystems often don't appear to be extensible, which is why Sun invented VFS. In any case, Apple's previously announced plan was to incorporate ZFS into Mac OS X Server, where a case-sensitive filesystem would be just fine with many potential users. Certainly a version of ZFS which directly incorporated some of these other HFS+ features might be useful on Mac OS X, and couldbe named ZFS+ or something.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Right. Apple's going to take their fancy schmancy high powered kernel hacking filesystem writing developers (some of which were rescued at great expense and inconvenience from Sun, and Be, Slashdot's other favorite filesystem makers) and reassign them to work on Voice Memo for iPhone. That's why ZFS is behind schedule. Why didn't I think of that?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
. By the way, have you heard of the iTunes Music Store? The iPhone App Store? Yikes.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Here's your solution: a second computer and an ethernet cable, running any filesystem you want (ext, xfs, jfs, reiser, whatever), plus an NFS export and maybe Samba.
It's a widely known fact that Apple uses Mac OS X Server to host the iTunes Music Store. No, I'm not going to provide you with a link. Learn to use Google.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
If you want to know more about the chief failing of the human intellect (our own limitations) start here:
Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find: They're blind to own failings, others' skills
Does that imply that if you are acutely aware of your own failings, then you are competent?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
They could get some of that.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Too bad you replied to the wrong post. If you use your mod points like that, perhaps its best you negated them.
Uhm... did you *read* this discussion? I'd say it's more like 50%.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
So, no, Larry's company becoming ZFS owner ain't the reason Steve's company would drop it.
Unless you keep in mind that Larry's got his own filesystem under the hood : BTRFS was Oracle's GPLed answer to Sun's ZFS (BSD licensed).
So perhaps Oracle is thinking that developing 2 competing filesystems with the same feature-set is maybe too much ? (Specially since Oracle tends to target slightly more often Linux than BSD - and thus could make sens to put more resource into a file system with a GPL-friendly license rather than a files system whose license makes it incompatible with Linux)
And perhaps they would like to drop ZFS in the long term ? So suddenly there's less incentive for Apple to support ZFS.
Or maybe, indeed, it has nothing to do with Oracle acquiring Sun and perhaps ZFS is to Apple what WinFS is to Microsoft: an eternal "Sorry, we didn't have time to implement it in the current version of the OS, but we promise we will put it into the next iteration. Trust us, that time it'll be for REAL !" vaporware.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If you mean, has Oracle management quietly told Sun to back off the ZFS evangalism, I kind of doubt it. It's hard to see why they would even care, at least not enough to risk getting caught doing something that could have nasty consequences — Oracle's acquisition of Sun still hasn't had federal approval, and illegally interfering with Sun's management would be just the thing to get it turned down.
The whole ZFS-on-MacOS thing is part of Sun's broader efforts to fight the marginalization of its technologies by open-sourcing them and then evangelizing everybody in sight to adopt them. This has happened not just with ZFS, but also with Solaris, the Sun implementation of Java, and even the Sparc CPU.
One aspect of this effort has been to push OpenSolaris and ZFS at desktop users. Pushing Apple to fully support ZFS (right now, they only provide a read-only driver) is part of this, as is a big push to get CS students and other hackers to download and use OpenSolaris on their personal PCs.
There's a certain amount of wishful thinking here. Solaris and ZFS do have very real and important technical advantages over their alternatives. But for a desktop user these advantages are pretty minimal. And to get them, you have to pay a big price in learning to use more complex tools and in not being able to participate in in bigger user communities.
Apple's response to Sun's ZFS evangelism was initial polite interest, but little positive effort over the long term. Not at all surprising: what use is ZFS to the typical Mac user? If servers were a bigger part of Apple's business it might be different.
In regard to the ZFS on a USB drive issue, I think it is probably a bad idea to market ZFS as a regular desktop filesystem - at least for now. It seems like it's more of a NAS/SAN (with comstar) replacement and not something to use with your USB drives.
How many here would be comfortable power cycling EMC Clariions or NetApp boxes arbitrarily? They have redundant power for a reason.
Personally, I've been burned so many times by people power cycling servers with RAID cards I get very nervous when I have to start working on a system that was hard power cycled. Is one of the disks now corrupt?
At any rate, you can deal with the USB issue if you're willing to remove the pool with the USB drive, then re-import it when you re-attach it.
Again, I'd say this is bad marketing. I'm likely to use FAT32 on small flash devices, but not on server filesystems. I'm willing to live with the issues ZFS has with removing a device from a pool as long as I'm using it on a server. They do claim that this will be resolved at some point. With as many people as Sun has laid off, is anyone surprised this is taking a while? I think it's less an issue of "arrogant engineers" (if any Linux zealots are saying this, they're being pretty hypocritical) and more of an issue of not enough man power.
The backend, for the vast majority of their customers, is up to the customer to decide. I had the pleasure of taking a grad CS course with an Akamai engineer, and I specifically asked him about Apple, which is one of the customers he works with. He said Apple provides their own backend.
Just playing devil's advocate: All the posts here seem to be trying to figure out what's wrong with ZFS to cause Apple to yank it out, but what if ZFS is fine and there's some big feature they're working on for HFS+ that they couldn't duplicate in ZFS?
I admit it's much more likely they just don't want to maintain full support for multiple filesystems, which is what they'd have to do because there's no way they're putting ZFS on iPhones and iPod Touches anytime soon.
Either way, the really telling thing is they aren't talking about ZFS in Mac OS X Server. If they had any plan for a ZFS future, it would start there much like the way HFS+ Journaling was initially a Mac OS X Server feature. (Introduced in OS X Server 10.2.2 and rolled out to non-server OS X in 10.3.)
Maybe they will actually innovate and create something new. Personally I would love to see them go down a new path with consumers in mind. I would like to see something like what Drobo does for storage (at least in theory) make RAID seamless to end users. Have options like "Optimize this system for video production - less reliable data", "Optimize this system for general use", "Optimize this system for maximum space" those sorts of things. Then the system would automatically add volumes to the storage pool or allow them to be removed (if possible) in the most optimized fashion (striping, mirroring, etc...).
Obviously, do basic cleanup while they are in there (performance optimization, larger general limits, etc...).
Personally, if they dropped ZFS to do this I would be happy and say it was a good call.
So, when did Apple promise ZFS? I don't remember that.
I remember some people at Sun shooting off their mouths about how it was going to be the NEW MAC FILESYSTEM, TOMORROW!!! ALSO, WILL TURN YOUR MINI INTO A CRAY!, but that was never substantiated by Apple. I remember ZFS being a played-down feature addition as an optional filesystem to Mac OS X Server, but that's it.
Unlike most other posters, I won't go on to distract the focus-challenged readers with any pro-/anti- Sun/Mac fanboyism.
You're looking at Akamai content caches. It doesn't seem to be a secret that the iTunes Music Store (purchasing engine, link handlers, content master archives) runs on Mac OS X Server, on XServer hardware. When the store first started, there was some Solaris in the mix, but that hasn't been the case for years.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Ask some folks running ZFS if they're experiencing problems... like "sorry, your data's gone" types of problems. Perhaps Apple's smartly just stepping back from the edge.
+++OK ATH