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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."
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.
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'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.
I'm thinking Balki effect.
No, Google "2 CEOs, 1 filesystem".
tequila really burns when it comes out your nose.
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.
One
Raging
Asshole
Called
Larry
Ellison
It's widely known that Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison are good friends, see this from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison
"On 18 December 2003, Ellison married Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, at his Woodside estate. His friend Steve Jobs, Apple, Inc's CEO, was the official wedding photographer."
So, no, Larry's company becoming ZFS owner ain't the reason Steve's company would drop it.
Sig erased via substitution of an identical one.
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