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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?
1) Oracle hasn't publicly said anything of that nature, nor is even any rumors to that effect.
2) They aren't mentioning the features that zfs provides under any kind of name
Most likely, they've been focusing too much on the embedded space with the iphone and didn't have the man power to integrate a complex third party FS into their OS. As it was only going to be for the OSX Server for "production servers", they probably thought that was the easiest thing to drop. I mean, lets be honest no one really uses OSX Server for anything really mission critical that relies on it for the kind of storage capabilities ZFS would provide. Do they? Feel free to correct me with real world usage senarios of OSX Server ( I haven't heard of much).
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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+.
I'm fairly confident of what it is, having actually used zfs on OS X.
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.
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
Hmm.. karma whore much?
I'm sure 99.9% of the people on Slashdot, who care enough to open the discussion know what ZFS is, and those who don't are perfectly capable of entering the term "ZFS" into Google.
But hell, lets see if I can do this too:
Apple:
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) is an American multinational corporation which designs and manufactures consumer electronics and software products. The company's best-known hardware products include Macintosh computers, the iPod and the iPhone. Apple software includes the Mac OS X operating system, the iTunes media browser, the iLife suite of multimedia and creativity software, the iWork suite of productivity software, and Final Cut Studio, a suite of professional audio and film-industry software products. The company operates more than 250 retail stores in nine countries[2] and an online store where hardware and software products are sold.
Sorry for trolling, have a six pack and a day off.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
There never was a ZFS. And Oceania was always at war with Eurasia.
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.
Mac OS X Server has a few features that are hard to replicate well on other servers, basically coming down to specific Mac management (Open Directory, NetBoot, Software Update), and in particular AFP file services. There are a lot of design/production companies out there with a lot of Macs who need a reasonable amount of storage, and AFP still tends to work better for Mac clients than things like SMB. We've got a few clients with a few hundred Macs and and ZFS would have been a good additional option to have for backend storage. The snapshot and scrub features alone would be a big benefit.
Xsan is great for certain situations but Apple's tools tend to target that towards video production, and not everyone needs or can afford a full SAN.
Slashdot
(for those that got here by accident... you can't leave them out).
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.
The iTunes store uses Akamai. So it uses Linux, not OSX at all.
The data loss and corruption that the parent is talking about is the fault of crap hardware. In almost every case, USB is involved, or more rarely the lack of ECC ram. It is true that ZFS is less tolerant of bad hardware.
What good is a fault tolerant file system if it isn't tolerant of faults?
With such hardware, it is impossible for any filesystem to function reliably.
Quite incorrect.
USB and Firewire bridges are notorious for this. If you care about your data, you should run the other way if you happen upon one.
Well, golly, those only happen to be the way 99.999% of Apple's customers attach exernal drives, not to mention 99.9% of all of the rest of the world.
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? ;-)
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?
I have been following the zfs-discuss list for years, and almost no one has lost data.
That's not good enough for the likes like me.
For the rest of your post, I am simply too lazy to prove you wrong. For a beer each I could fiddle out those that were confirmed to lead to data loss, including unrecoverable data loss, as I mentioned in my post.
But I won't do this (except for that beer each), because you know that best yourself:
The data loss and corruption that the parent is talking about is the fault of crap hardware. In almost every case, USB is involved, or more rarely the lack of ECC ram
Because this is exactly, word for word, the usual excuse given in the mailing list.
And I didn't add the one in my original post, when it was 'confirmed' that you need RAID if your data are valuable to you; and now, read this in bold: irrespective of hardware failure. I for one accept the need for RAID, in case of a hard disk really and effectively dying. Not for manhandling the data. Read the postings carefully.
Of course, the other person answering your flawed arguments about 'crap hardware' is right to the point: What good is a fault tolerant file system if it isn't tolerant of faults?
May I remind you, the premise and promise of ZFS was the atomic write, the always consistent state on the drive. I do think and believe this is true, and all blocks are either written and confirmed or just not. As far as I can make out, the problem has only been shifted: to the problem of metadata. Again, refer to the mailing list. Those exist in four-fold. Why? It seems the consistency of blocks on the drive being guaranteed, the layer of actually having the links to those correct data is more vulnerable. Think of a pool: if you jank the structure of a pool by janking a USB, you have 100% correct data (contrary to any other file system, I agree), but alas no more structured access to reassemble them (compared to inodes).
(The mods opting for 'informative' of your post obviously don't read the ZFS mailing list, and nobody blames them.)
Every disk will corrupt eventually, it's just a matter of time. Not even the best hardware will help you there. So the question is, how well does the filesystem catch these errors and correct them. It turns out, ZFS is really bad at this, as it can get into a state where you can't even import the pool (where zpool either stops with an error and in worse cases causes a kernel panic). There have been numerous bug reports on the zfs mailing list and the opensolaris bug tracker. So far nobody seems interesting in fixing those. My pool got corrupted in such way. I had to manually poke around the filesystem and invalidate metadata until zpool was able to import the pool. Something that a 'fsck' could have easily done, but Sun refuses to create such tool because, according to them, ZFS is robust enough. All credits go to this guy who had the idea to invalidate the uberblocks directly on the disk: http://opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messageID=318457#318457
What ZFS does have that typical Apple Consumers would like to see it on desktops
Pretty much all of it applies equally to consumer systems.
ZFS is not miracle what is not possible to gain already with other kind setup with RAID and other filesystem
You need to study ZFS more, as you clearly know little about it. Almost no RAID systems can do what ZFS does. Hints: end to end checksumming; self-healing; copy on write; ...
Hint: The extra capability largely comes from integrating both the "filesystem" and "volume manager" layers, which are separate modules in traditional configurations. Calling ZFS a "filesystem" seems to mislead a lot of people that it can be compared to other "filesystems"; and the fact that ZFS implements RAID-like redundancy leads people to think that it can be compared to other "RAID" systems. Sure, it can be compared, but conventional systems will generally lose (notably in data integrity, but also in performance, manageability, etc).
you had me at #!
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 #!
I have been following the zfs-discuss list for years, and almost no one has lost data.
That must be a different list than the one I've been reading....
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-April/027748.html
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-April/027765.html
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-January/025601.html
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-March/027629.html
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-March/027365.html
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-March/027257.html
You're right on the button. I created a sparse file for each machine image using diskutil so I could fix maximum size (I'd hate it to take over my entire 2.5 TB pool). The trick is to figure out the name that each machine wants, but worse comes to worse, you cancel it quick on the first sync if it's wrong and then rename the file and start it again.
Then I used the native CIFS service that comes with OpenSolaris for the connection. I started with Samba, but the native CIFS service had 1000X better throughput.
There is an option that enables mounting "foreign" disks for time machine. This may explain it better:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080420211034137