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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."
Could this be a Larry effect?
At my workplace we migrated to a brand new sun NFS server with ZFS and hit a critical bug in the first two weeks. If Sun can't get it right I don't expect others to.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
More like the last nail in the coffin . . .
Which is what I hope. Having tried forth and back over the last years, trying to convince myself, that it would fulfill its promises (and it promises a lot! and all beautiful things) one day or another.
It simply didn't. Which is a shame, since if it did, ZFS would be last file system mankind would have ever needed.
But even in 2009, it suffers from serious problems, just read the ZFS list in OpenSolaris. Basic things, that is.
Like boot corruption; like unusable system, if you pull the power, and pull the power again while it is restarting; Like slowness under specific conditions; like rendering the file system unbootable, reproducibly, when using a specific setup of snapshots.
The latter, not addressed on the mailing list, killed our interest immediately.
Not to forget some arrogance of the Sun engineers when it turned out that you cannot simply unplug a USB-drive. And it won't be enough, to umount it, neither. If you want the data to be there, sure, after the removal, you have to export the drive. Now tell this to Aunt Tilly. Or me, when I stumble over a USB-cable and out it is. And my data, as confirmed on the mailing list, potentially gone forever; with, confirmed, no tool available for recovery.
My last hope for it, had been that the engineers at Apple were able to give it the life-line needed to provide reliable Time-Machines (the snapshots of ZFS are just perfect therefore), but obviously, they have given up just as well.
I bet that something like ZFS will resurrect, one day or another. It simply has to. But ZFS as of today is more like Leonardo's drawings of a copter, compared to an Apache.
What ZFS does have that typical Apple Consumers would like to see it on desktops and not just on servers?
Almost every ZFS oriented discussion, there just comes one point up. ZFS is not miracle what is not possible to gain already with other kind setup with RAID and other filesystem.
I'm in the same boat. For years I've been looking for a file system can hold files larger than 2GB and can be mounted from Windows and Mac OS X (and maybe Linux). That would allow me to store all my work on one partition, and access it from Mac OS X, from Windows via Boot Camp, or from Windows inside Parallels or VMware Fusion. It would also allow me to transfer large files back and forth between my Mac and other Windows computers. I was hoping ZFS would be that file system.
The last time I checked (the middle of 2008), the only way to do this was via NTFS, and the only read-write support for NTFS on OSX was the MacFUSE NTFS driver, which was pretty slow.
I just saw that MacDrive 7.2 now allows Windows Vista x64 (my Boot Camp OS) to read HFS disks, so maybe I'll give that a try. There are also rumors that Snow Leopard's Boot Camp utility will include drivers for Windows to read HFS disks, so maybe that will help too.
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.