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ZFS Set To Eventually Play Larger Role in OSX
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Oct 05, 2007 09:44 AM
from the all-growed-up dept.
from the all-growed-up dept.
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."
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[+]
Sun CEO Says ZFS Will Be 'the File System' for OSX 384 comments
Fjan11 writes "Sun's Jonathan Schwartz has announced that Apple will be making ZFS 'the file system' in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. It's possible that Leopard's Time Machine feature will require ZFS to run, because ZFS has back-up and snapshots build right in to the filesystem as well as a host of other features. 'Rumors of Apple's interest in ZFS began in April 2006, when an OpenSolaris mailing list revealed that Apple had contacted Sun regarding porting ZFS to OS 10. The file system later began making appearances in Leopard builds. ZFS has a long list of improvements over Apple's current file system, Journaled HFS+.'"
[+]
Apple Confirms No (Default) ZFS In Leopard 362 comments
javipas writes "Despite recent rumors about the possible inclusion of ZFS as the filesystem of choice for MacOS X 10.5 'Leopard', an Apple executive has denied this possibility. Brian Croll, senior director of product marketing for the Mac OS has as much as said 'ZFS is not happening ... Croll declined to comment on statements made last week by Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz, who said the use of ZFS would be announced at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Upon further questioning, Croll would only confirm that Apple had never said ZFS would be a part of Leopard. A representative with Sun did not have any immediate comment.' Users of the future operating system will have to keep working with HFS+, a filesystem that is almost ten years old now." Update: 06/12 19:57 GMT by KD : An Apple spokesman contacted InformationWeek with a correction, which they ran as a comment on their original story: What Apple meant to say was, "ZFS would be available as a limited option, but not as the default file system."
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ZFS Set To Eventually Play Larger Role in OSX
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Clearly ZFS is superior... (Score:1, Funny)
(http://www.sylvanmigdal.com/)
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)
Re:Does anyone proofread these articles? (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.spamgourmet.com/)
Right, and emacs is a text editor.
Re:Does anyone proofread these articles? (Score:4, Funny)
(http://stefanco.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 14, @11:09AM)
Re:Does anyone proofread these articles? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.drones.com/)
Re:Does anyone proofread these articles? (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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)
Time Machine (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Time Machine (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.lkmc.ch/)
Damnit! (Score:2, Funny)
a true end (Score:4, Informative)
(http://evil.google.com/)
Re:a true end (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://honeypot.net/ | Last Journal: Friday April 07 2006, @09:33AM)
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)
(http://www.macnytt.com/)
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)
(http://www.michaelchaney.com/)
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...
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.
They said the same thing about UFS. (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.scarydevil.com/~peter/ | Last Journal: Monday September 26 2005, @06:53PM)
So don't do anything that would depend on them supporting ZFS.
Re:They said the same thing about UFS. (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.noooxml.org/petition)
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.
Re:They said the same thing about UFS. (Score:4, Insightful)
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]
I maintain: (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://utropicmedia.net/)
Watch for the robotics coming out, very quietly, from Sun in the next 10 years.
Translation: (Score:2)
(http://home.columbus.rr.com/tbaer/)
"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.
ZFS is still missing 1 very important feature (Score:1, Interesting)
I was amazed to discover though that ZFS can't increase the size of a RAID5 or 6 dataset. Given the ability to dynamically add storage is various other ways it is extraordinary that something as common as resizing RAID5 is missing.
Expandable storage (Score:1)
Just wondering about the implications... (Score:2)
(http://www.tuneforge.com/)
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 coffee I had this morning.
My understanding is that one of the features of ZFS is effectively infinite virtual device size, spread over effectively infinite numbers of physical volumes in a RAID configuration.
Since the introduction of iTMS, especially with TV and movies, Apple is now very much in the business of pushing bits, and the costs of that bit-pushing grow--maybe not linearly, but they do grow--as demand for those bits grows.
People have been suggesting that Apple might be building some sort of BitTorrent client to facilitate distribution of content, and I'm thinking that ZFS might be a key to this.
Perhaps--and this is where my understanding of the technology may be leading me down the wrong path--they could build some sort of ZFS hooks into iTunes such that, if the user chooses to do so, they could mount their purchased library as a network-shared ZFS partition and register an IP address and port with an Apple server. If someone wants to buy a TV show that 10 people have already bought, they get a magic read-only volume mounted which is effectively a network-mounted RAID1 partition striped across those 10 drives, with access only to the TV show in question.
The iTunes hosts which are providing the data shake hands and agree on some sort of wrapper that is provided by the Apple servers, and encode their data appropriately. The buyer then gets their content with minimal data flow from Apple's infrastructure.
To provide incentive for people to do this, perhaps Apple offers lower-cost or even free content to regular bandwidth contributors.
Is this feasible, or even a likely path that they would be thinking of with ZFS, or am I just on crack?
Aliases (Score:1)
Pure BS (Score:1, Flamebait)
(http://www.lkmc.ch/)
FileIDs? (Score:2)
Re:So.... BSD or Solaris??? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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?
Re:So.... BSD or Solaris??? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.geocities.com/memfrob)
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...
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.
Non-Standard my ass! (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://kaiwai.blogspot.com/)
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.
Re:So.... BSD or Solaris??? (Score:2)
(http://www.noooxml.org/petition)
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.
Re:So.... BSD or Solaris??? (Score:2)
Re:So.... BSD or Solaris??? (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Thursday November 01, @09:12PM)