ZFS Set To Eventually Play Larger Role in OSX 196
BlueMerle writes with the news that Sun's ZFS filesystem is going to see 'rudimentary support' under OSX Leopard. That's a stepping stone to bigger and better things, as the filesystem will eventually play a much larger role in Apple OS versions. AppleInsider reports: "The developer release, those people familiar with the matter say, is a telltale sign that Apple plans further adoption of ZFS under Mac OS X as the operating system matures. It's further believed that ZFS is a candidate to eventually succeed HFS+ as the default operating system for Mac OS X -- an unfulfilled claim already made in regard to Leopard by Sun's chief executive Jonathan Schwartz back in June. Unlike Apple's progression from HFS to HFS+, ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology, but rather a fundamentally new approach to data management. It aims to provide simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability."
Does anyone proofread these articles? (Score:5, Funny)
Macs are really going to stink if Apple changes their default operating system to ZFS. ZFS is a file system.
Re:Does anyone proofread these articles? (Score:4, Funny)
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Bad Technology Journalism (Score:2)
It would appear that Appleinsider's writers can't tell the difference between an Operating System and a File System. Bad Science Journalism is about the same thing as Bad Information Technology Journalism. Is one more widespread than the other? If Science Journalism is worse, then I wonder what we do differently with Tech jornalism that we can apply there.
I once worked for a company where the CTO couldn't tell the difference between NN
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Re:Does anyone proofread these articles? (Score:4, Funny)
Right, and emacs is a text editor.
Re:Does anyone proofread these articles? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Does anyone proofread these articles? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does anyone proofread these articles? (Score:5, Insightful)
Barbie says "Proofreading is hard!" (Score:2)
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http://www.youtube.com/comment_servlet?all_comments&v=zTlHKXbBqFQ&fromurl=/watch%3Fv%3DzTlHKXbBqFQ [youtube.com] (1wellhowdydoo1)
Buzz compliant (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't talk about end-to-end data integrity when this is just a filesystem. It's only one tiny place where the data you store in said file system can wreck its integrity. Are there memory bus or in-memory check for integrity of data read from ZFS? What about applications?
Also stop talking to ZFS. Very secret internal sources told me ZFS was supposed to be a bigger event in Leopard but Steve killed it because Sun scooped him. It has happened before folks!
Don't scoop the Steve. You scoop the Steve and business is over.
Re:Buzz compliant (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Buzz compliant (Score:5, Informative)
They have defined what they mean by that claim already: they have a checksum (256-bit, I think) on every block, and that checksum is checked from the OS when the block is read.
This will catch some errors that might otherwise go uncaught, which is important for servers that move a lot of data around.
It will not catch a memory error at the wrong time, or a processor error that stores the wrong value, or an error in the brain of the person who reads the data from the screen.
Re:Buzz compliant (Score:5, Informative)
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Not quite... ZFS stores a checksum with each block pointer. So wherever you have a structure that indicates where the data is, there's also a checksum of that data. This also means that the block pointers themselves are checksummed with their pointers. And so forth. The only one that doesn't have a checksum with the pointer is the top-level root pointer, and they have multiple copies of that for redundant checksumming.
And yes, for true integrity, you need ECC memory, and ECC CPUs. I don't know if the
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They shouldn't, if that is indeed the case. OTOH, you are only asking that question because you are trusting the words of some pseudonymous poster on Slashdot. Why do you trust that what he said happened, actually happened?
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There you go [zdnet.co.uk]
Time Machine (Score:2, Interesting)
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Anyway we will hopefully see it in a minor release update, I just hope they don't call it beta just to remove it later and not releas
Re:Time Machine (Score:4, Informative)
Damnit! (Score:2, Funny)
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I believe the function you describe is still broken (completely absent) on Safari, which could also be the cause of confusion. I reported the problem months ago but always have to switch back to the old comment system to post a comment that is not a reply to some other post.
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Thanks.
a true end (Score:4, Informative)
Re:a true end (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll be happy to see them kill that obsolete feature. It's hard to implement everything-is-a-file semantics when some things are files, and others are combinations of random amounts of metadata.
Not so. ZFS could handle resources (Score:5, Informative)
You know.. Wikipedia is very handy to look these things up. Please do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS [wikipedia.org]
Re:Not so. ZFS could handle resources (Score:4, Funny)
Dude, we're still trying to get people to read the linked article. Let's not get too crazy.
Re:Not so. ZFS could handle resources (Score:4, Informative)
They are starting to do some stuff with them. The first major use I know of was with XP SP2. With that, when you downloaded a file from the internet, IE would mark it as such in an alternate stream. When the program was run, someone (I don't know who) would check for the presence of the stream and if it was there, would display a "this program came from an untrusted source, would you like to run it?" dialog.
I would expect more uses as we move into the future, as Vista is pushing even heavier for NTFS (for instance, IIRC the installer didn't ask which file system I wanted to use and just formatted NTFS), and MS doesn't have to worry about, for instance, some 98 or ME user who upgraded to XP but is still running FAT so he didn't have to reformat. For my large partitions (~100 GB), I can't format as anything but NTFS. (I don't know about smaller ones; I have a 24 GB system partition but if I try to bring up the format dialog there it complains that I'm trying to reformat the drive with the OS and I don't want to do that.)
Personally, I think that there's a lot of awesome stuff that you could use extended attributes and alternate streams (WHY are these separate concepts on some file systems?!) if only they would be preserved when you move stuff around systems, upload them, etc., and am somewhat resentful at Unix and POSIX for the fact that for ages they didn't do this stuff and hence it's really hard to move to using them because no one supports them because there's no demand because people haven't thought of what to do with them because they haven't seen what can be done with them because no one uses them because no one supports them because...
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With OS X, Apple rolled the resource fork into the "data fork" portion of the file, meaning the information was still there for legacy purposes.
That doesn't sound right to me-- or at least I'm not sure what you mean by that. OSX still has resource forks, but Apple basically told developers not to put important information in them anymore because they get lost so easily. They can't just push the resource fork into the data fork of the file, because in many formats there's essentially no space for that in
folders are even worse (Score:4, Interesting)
Want to upload that Keynote project to your friendly CMS via a web browser? Can't, because it's not a file, it's a #@$!ing FOLDER. You have to zip it first. Words cannot accurately describe how tiresome this becomes.
It also makes data recovery (should the file get accidentally deleted) nearly impossible- the files inside the folder are not named uniquely or in any identifiable manner.
ZFS isn't nearly all it is cracked up to be- among other things, you can't expand RAID-Z...absolutely moronic. I'm not even sure you can expand a simple mirrored pool. Users have been repeatedly asking for growing abilities, and the developer reaction was "just create a larger pool and move it over". That's hilariously stupid advice given that you usually don't have that kind of storage hanging around- not even in enterprise environments.
There's simply no comprehension amongst the ZFS developers that virtually EVERY raid card on the market supports such an operation. Even more shocking was when one developer said (paraphrasing) "gosh, how would one even go about doing that sort of thing?"
Don't get me wrong- checksumming and automatic disk scrubbing are features long overdue, but ZFS is not magic bullet.
Re:folders are even worse (Score:4, Informative)
It's true that you can't expand a RAID-Z set (I think, anyway -- if you replace all of the drives, one at a time, does that work?), but you can add another RAID-Z set, and expand the pool.
That's the big thing in ZFS, combining all of the resources into a pool, rather than treating disks (or groups of disks) as part of a volume. The other part of this was making filesystems nearly as light-weight as directories.
My plan is to use twinned drives, adding them as a mirror to the pool. I can replace each drive individually, let it re-silver, and then do the same with the other, to expand it, or I can simply add another pair of drives to the pool, and get more space that way. There are advantages and disadvantages to each.
Oh, as for resource forks -- the model that Sun is choosing (as are some others) is that the extended attributes are treated as sub-files to a directory. I'm not sure that simply going to a directory is not a better idea, but that has a whole slew of its own problems. It's a bit ironic, really -- Apple had an idea from the beginning, and every application was prepared to deal with it, but nobody else did the same thing. Then, when Apple went with the flow, everyone else started trying to do what Apple did... and none of the applications are prepared for it.
I'm not sure how it'll all turn out.
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Want to upload that Keynote project to your friendly CMS via a web browser? Can't, because it's not a file, it's a #@$!ing FOLDER. You have to zip it first. Words cannot accurately describe how tiresome this becomes.
True, but you'd have had the same problem with a multi-fork file, since the web process would upload the data fork... HTTP forms don't know anything about multi-fork files.
Better would be for the web browser to auto-zi
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It just sounds like it's implemented wrong on MacOS. For instance, you could have "file-folder aware" applications and "file-folder unaware" applications, distinguished by the API they use or a flag they pass to open or something like that, and if your web browser doesn't explicitly say "I want the folder view" it will automatically zip it during the read calls.
It kind of works that way within OSX and treats them as files unless you explicitly try to look at the contents. However, it's not smart enough t
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Admittedly, I'm no expert here, so forgive me if there's something naive about the idea.
I think it's a good idea... however the likely reason why they don't do it that
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I'm sure there are other filesystems that have done the same thing in the past as well.
They said the same thing about UFS. (Score:4, Interesting)
So don't do anything that would depend on them supporting ZFS.
Re:They said the same thing about UFS. (Score:5, Informative)
Spotlight in current form tries to index every single source file, huge framework headers and there is no practical way to stop it. I have tried the Privacy pane as suggested and no, it doesn't explain my 130 MB of spotlight metadata after installing Developer tools and couple of GNU libraries.
If they have checked the NeXT history, they would figure the UFS is the default,supported Filesystem on NeXT. As OS X is a mix of NeXT with FreeBSD and Cocoa/Carbon, it is pretty natural that UFS gets into it a bit lately but finally.
I can imagine what Apple needs for supporting ZFS on startup volumes. Complete metadata and resource support. They could be happy with their ext3 plain filesystem but Apple using professionals REALLY label their files, sometimes change their icons, sometimes has to FORCE OS to open a file with a different version of suite (e.g. Quark 7 vs 6), add comments to them and professional software developers like Adobe still stores critical data on resource forks.
If there is a way to make ZFS support all those features without huge hacks (like the ZIP _resource stuff), they would give up their HFS+. Another thing is, it must support every serious software (non hack) backwards. You may find yourself using a application from 2001 written in Carbon under OS X and only it can provide the tool you require.
I am saying these since some elitists think Apple is backwards and stupid still supporting resource forks and implement special features to OS X just to give minimum compatibility with old applications.
Before critising HFS+ and suggesting Apple to use plain, Unix filesystems, they should sit around in a professional environment such as a DTP house, Movie studio and see how all those "childish" "backwards" features are used by professionals in job.
This is not a post against ZFS, I am just trying to explain why Apple can't magically move to another filesystem just because it has better features. Not even mentioning the "overhead" required by ZFS and the fact that there are some 2k/4k (Cinema) edit environments which you can't even enable journaling let alone adding another layer of overhead.
Also while writing these, if I only used plain Unix tools without any "native Mac" Application, e.g. use OS X as Darwin with X11, UFS would be my choice of filesystem.
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I'm an old-school UNIX guy who qualifies as part of "the UFS-using community" and Spotlight is Tiger's "killer app" for me.
Apple already implemented support for resource forks and almost all the other metadata in HFS+ in arbitrary file systems. Yes, if you go down to the command line you can see some of that metadata exposed at that level. But that's the way it should be... if you're working at that level you need all the data to be enu
Re:They said the same thing about UFS. (Score:4, Insightful)
UFS has an FSCK that really works (Score:3, Interesting)
In one way, at least, UFS is far better than HFS+.
The internal redundancy in UFS means that so long as the basic file system structures (directories, inodes, and indirect blocks) are intact, it can be repaired. The idea of having file system damage in a bootable file system that can't be repaired by FSCK is all but inconceivable for UFS or any of its precursor file systems. In nearly 30 years working with UNIX, once FSCK was introduced I *never* had
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The internal redundancy in UFS means that so long as the basic file system structures (directories, inodes, and indirect blocks) are intact, it can be repaired.
This has nothing to do with 'internal redundancy', it has to do with filesystem metadata not being as easy to damage. UFS maintains a kind of free list to allocate new blocks, whereas HFS+ and JFS and XFS use bitmap allocation. If you stomp on part of a bitmap it's way worse than stomping on part of a list. ZFS on the other hand has a tree of blocks and can keep a configurable number of redundant copies on each drive and there are sometimes older copies that exist depending on how full the filesystem an
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It got a lot better in Panther with the import of FreeBSD's latest UFS, though they never implemented even as much metadata support as they fake in foreign network filesystems. They didn't go anywhere with it, either.
Like you I wanted to use UFS to get away from the "PC-quality" HFS+, but no dice... so I'm really dubious about them doing anything for desktop users with ZFS. I suspect it's only going to be u
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Pretty certain.
They use the fsevent mechanism in the vnode layer for some of it, and the application-level stuff should work on any file system because that's not actually in the file system... it's in the
I thought they they
Correcting errors in AppleInsider ZFS article (Score:2, Informative)
Please do not bother with this debunking (via Macjournals) unless you are truly interested. Thanks.
http://www.macjournals.com/news/2007/10/04.html#a79 [macjournals.com]
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This wasn't a debunking, it was more of a whiny "AppleInsider gets way more traffic than we do, so we'll dump on what they have to say, even though we don't have anything to add to it."
Despite the macjournals piece, ZFS is cool, and it is better than HFS+journaled, at some things. Deal with it.
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Well, duh. Since booting under ZFS is still an unreleased feature on Solaris, let alone Mac OS X, it's not any kind of startup volume.
From the macjournals page (which looks like ass, by the way), pretending to quote AppleInsider:
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If HFS or HFS+ are so great, then why isn't there more interest in porting HFS or HFS+ to other OS's such as Linux or the BSD's?
I maintain: (Score:5, Interesting)
Watch for the robotics coming out, very quietly, from Sun in the next 10 years.
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Translation: (Score:2)
"We don't have an LVM layer to speak of, so we're going to build it into the file system."
There are a lot of things to like about ZFS. The built-in LVM isn't one of them IMHO, but I can see where it might be attractive if either you don't already have an LVM subsystem or your existing LVM subsystem is complete crap.
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Way easier to manage: only 2 commands! While now with an LVM you have to place your disks in the desired topology inside your LVM (RAID0, 1, 5, ...), format them, put a filesystem on, mount, file check, repair, whatever. With zfs you place disks in your pool and kinda mount part of it, that's it.
There are some other things you could complain about: it makes less sense on hardware RAIDs with good management tools. They missed a chance to make it a distributed or clusterable file system (though they bought
built in LVM == Win (Score:3, Insightful)
Just wondering about the implications... (Score:2)
That being said, they may have something up their sleeves, and forgive me if the connection between ZFS and my idea is tenuous. If it seems like a silly idea, I blame the overdose of
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A filesystem isn't a kernel, so leaping from the incorporation of ZFS into Darwin to a replacement of Mach and/or the BSD bits with Solaris is a bizarre one.
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I wonder if I should be concerned that FreeBSD is moving toward Solaris and away from FreeBSD.
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Don't die. 7.0 is fine for non-critical uses. (Score:2)
Re:So.... BSD or Solaris??? (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, Mac OS X is certified standard UNIX. Solaris is also certified standard UNIX. And they're both fully POSIX compliant.
What are some examples of non-standard tools?
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How many people have learned that one the hard way?
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It's good enough for Linux but not good enough for you?
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You should get out more: (from the Linux manpage)
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Re:So.... BSD or Solaris??? (Score:5, Informative)
According to the Single Unix Standard [opengroup.org], only Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) can be considered "Unix". And only when deployed on Intel-based Macs. Previous versions must be considered like Linux: "Unix-like".
FWIW, Sun's operating system (SunOS) has been fairly close to Unix standards over its lifetime. In fact, the official version of System V release 4 was written by Sun and called SunOS 5, integrated into Solaris 2
Why is anyone even having this argument? GNU means "Gnu's NOT Unix" for a reason...
even then (Score:3)
Even conforming to the standard means that it is "UNIX" only in one sense; in terms of its internal architecture, OS X is still completely different from a traditional UNIX.
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It is still a long way from following IEEE Std 1003.1
Solaris still defaults to non-compliant tools (/usr/xpg4/bin is not in PATH,
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Not exactly, all Sun operating systems are called SunOS. SunOS 4.1 == Solaris 1 and SunOS 5.x == Solaris 2.x. (Of course then Sun decided they needed some big numbers -- MacOS was up there in the 9s and 10s, and Windows was at 2000! Solaris 2.8 was renamed Solaris 8 and voila! instant credibility!
Re:So.... BSD or Solaris??? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm hoping not, since many things behave very oddly on Solaris. Non standard tools and such, but it would be one way to keep it from running on cracked PC's.
2 cents,
QueenB.
If by "non-standard tools" you mean non-GNU, yes, but they are hardly odd.
I have no idea what your "cracked PCs" comment is all about, and what it has to do with Solaris and ZFS.
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The whole post is just weird, I wonder how it even got +2 =P
Non-Standard my ass! (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you smokeing - what ever it is, pass it this way. Non-standard or 'does not conform to the bastardised standards which GNU have embraced and extended'. Case in point, look at the number of nimrods who assume gnu grep and use gnu specific switches for their make scripts.
It isn't Solaris that it is non-standard, it is those who insist on using GNU tools and their extensions to the standard which are the non-standard.
Evolve or die (Score:2)
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look at the number of nimrods who assume gnu grep and use gnu specific switches for their make scripts.
Or, for that matter, assume that /bin/sh means /bin/bash. (Which causes their scripts to break on Ubuntu too, since Ubuntu uses dash for /bin/sh.)
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That's no surprise. The GNU Project competes with Microsoft in the 'Embrace/Extend/Extinguish' derby.
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Who has the GNU Project extinguished so far?
You left out D... (Score:2)
I thought that Apple and SGI should have merged at one time. It no longer makes sense, but at the time (say, 2000 or before) both were clear leaders in graphics and visualization. It would have been very interesting to have a common software platform from true desktop to true datacenter.
The party is kind of over now, as Apple has decided they are a consumer electronics company and not a computer company and Sun is less interested than they used to be in the de
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oh, puhleeeze (Score:2, Insightful)
OS X is a heavily hacked Mach kernel with a bit of BSD code thrown in. Its architecture and codebase are completely different from UNIX. So, apart from a bit of UNIX compatibility and a lot of marketing hype, OS X is not UNIX.
Will they "move towards Solaris"? I have no idea what that even would mean.
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No, I think ZFS would make that use case unreliable, since unplugging the external disk would fault the entire pool (aka you lose access to all your data until you plug the external disk back in).
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ZFS is great for many situations, but it's no good as a default OS X file system, and Apple knows it. For example, it could not be used as the basis of Time Machine because it would use way too much disk space. ZFS is great. It's just not magic, as some people seem to think
I find it amusing that my post go