ZFS Shows Up in New Leopard Build 351
Udo Schmitz writes "As a follow-up to rumours from May this year, World of Apple has a screenshot showing Sun's Zettabyte File System in "the most recent Build of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard". Though I still wonder: If it is not meant to replace HFS+, could there be any other reasons to support ZFS?"
copy-on-write (Score:4, Insightful)
What a moron (Score:2, Insightful)
Duh... It's called compatibility.
Not a likely replacement... (Score:5, Insightful)
ZFS vs HFS vs NTFS? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never found plain-Jane posix permissions to be all that useful on anything other than the most basic of server environments.
HFS has going for it all the fun stuff we've come to love apple for, such as transparent file customization like icons, labels, meta data, and whatnot through resource forks. I assume that these can be made to work with ZFS by making hidden files.
What I'd really like to see is both that kind of functionality along with NTFS's really excellent ACL permission system implemented. ACL permissions are a godsend for people responsible for running a file store that's used by humans as opposed to automated processes. NTFS also has a great deal of capacity for meta-data, although not to the same level as HFS.
NTFS is one of the few worthwhile things that's ever come out of Redmond. I wish more people would spend a bit learning from it without throwing it away simply because it's MS bloat.
Re:What a moron (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't full NTFS support (or well, support for any FS more in use then ZFS today) make more sense?
Re:What a moron (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I mean it's not like NTFS is defined and controlled by an organization renowned for its hostility to other platforms, reluctant to document things in a way that other people can implement them, and scared of interoperability, is it?
Re:going for Linux incompatibility, it seems (Score:1, Insightful)
Going off on a tangent, it's a little funny that everyone is always going on about how "free" the GPL is, and yet ZFS is open-source, but not useable by Linux because of the GPL. I'm liking the BSD license more every day.
Re:ZFS vs HFS vs NTFS? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish MS would let us. NTFS is worthless if you don't run Windows. And it hinders interoperability with other systems because its implementation and disk layout is secret/patented.
Why, do you think, there is no stable implementation that can write NTFS volumes (other than the MS implementation)?
Contrast this with ZFS which is released under an open source license.
Re:ZFS vs HFS vs NTFS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not a likely replacement... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ZFS vs HFS vs NTFS? (Score:5, Insightful)
You assume correctly, since most of that business is taken care of with Bundles. This is why it more or less works on UFS, which is already supported on Mac OS X, and has been for years. Forks & whatnot are really a legacy idea.
That's funny! The HFS+ ACL system is Microsoft's ACL system, much to the chagrin of the Unix community.
Re:Otherwise... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Reasons to support? Servers (Score:4, Insightful)
By the way it's nice to see dtrace, open source Java, and now ZFS coming out of Sun recently. I almost feel sorry for how little they get out of a lot of their innovations, they remind me of Bell Labs just before they died.
Secure Delete? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it would pose a problem for secure deletes. Try to obliterate a file by overwriting it with garbage, you end up writing somewhere else instead? Would the next overwrite attempt get the original location or would you have to write enough garbage to cycle over all the free space of the volume? Considering how large these volumes can get, that's a lot of boiled oceans [wikipedia.org] for a multi-pass secure delete.
Re:Reasons to support? Servers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What a moron (Score:1, Insightful)
And why is that? Maybe because Microsoft never released any specs, and keeps changing stuff in their implementations without notice, uses hidden API-calls themselves in Windows and do their best NOT to make NTFS widely accepted as a filesystem? In their blind crusade against dual-booters, they alienate everyone who might see value in their technology (NTFS is actually quite good in many ways).
However, NTFS is not a filesystem for any other OS than Microsoft OSes, so can hardly be called a filesystem _at all_.
There are ways around it, but I wouldnt count my business data on reverse-engineered solutions for something as critical as a filesystem. Most implementations cant even handle encryption and compression etc either, because those are even more secret add-ons to NTFS. Not even Knoppix are able to handle NTFS in any sane manner, and sadly NTFS is needed for XP / Vista. Maybe the features covered are about 40%, and youll be lucky if the data wont dissappear one day, or Microsoft changes something and it all falls apart.
Paranoid companies such as Microsoft that works against everyone else should NOT be supported back, because theyre not supporting the community. They deserve to die as the dinosaurs they are. They patented stuff in FAT32 too, which only show how hostile parasites theyve become. Theyve used this patents against Flash / Camera-card companies, which has to pre-format FAT32 to be able to support Windows-users. When they can use a patent of the horrible hack that is FAT32 and long filenames, to extort money from companies supporting their own OS, Windows, how can we be able to support NTFS, even if Microsoft would let us?
Writing this from my new shiny Macbook Pro 17".
Re:Reasons to support? Servers (Score:3, Insightful)
With RAID-5, as with RAID-1, the critical number of disks is one. RAID-5 cannot transparently correct errors that occur on even a single stripe, unless you know a priori which stripe is affected.
With RAID-6 you can automatically correct errors that occur on a single stripe, but it still does not automatically detect such errors on read the way ZFS and RAID-Z do.
Or, you know, a checksum.
That's a great idea. Too bad those ZFS guys didn't think of it. Oh, wait.
Re:Reasons to support? Servers (Score:3, Insightful)
The underlying hardware will not necessarily notice errors. Hard drives are only designed to error protect the magnetic domains on the disk. There are all sorts of other places in the increasingly long datapath to disk where data can be lost, and, in fact, routinely does get lost.
The choice to verify every read is purely an implementation decision
RAID-6 does not verify every read because it is a stupid way to achieve data integrity. It wastes two thirds of your aggregate IO read bandwidth when you can just use checksums virtually for free. CPU cycles for checksumming is dirt cheap whereas IO bandwidth is extremely expensive.
I was just arguing the novelity you seem to think ZFS has -- using checksums to verify data integrity is not exactly cutting-edge computer science.
Yet strangely there aren't any other widely available storage solutions that provide transparent data integrity from the filesystem down.
I just don't think this particular feature is unique or superior to other available solutions for the same problem.
Then name another one. I think we've already shown that vanilla RAID does not qualify.
Re:Secure Delete? (Score:3, Insightful)
Good Reasons To Support ZFS on Mac (Score:2, Insightful)
Here are five good reasons for Apple to go to ZFS:
-No more Disk Warrior. The entire data store is self-validating. No bit rot.
-No RAID controllers needed: ZFS gives you fast RAID for free. Just add drives. Why would anyone care? See #5.
-No more volumes and, therefore, no more volume management. ZFS eliminates the whole volume concept. Add a disk to your system and it joins your storage pool. More capacity. Not more management. What home user would want that?
-Continuous Data Protection out of the box. Time Machine could give you a view of your data every time you update a file.
-ITV, or whatever it is going to be called. Multi-GB files that each cost $10-20, that can't be backed up - thanks DRM! - and therefore need a cheap and highly reliable RAID. ITV, two firewire drives, ZFS and you are in business.
-Not to mention the existential pleasure of having great technology that Vista doesn't have. In fact, since consumer technology is driving the enterprise, expect ZFS on Mac to raise the bar for every OS and file system.
I suspect that Time Machine is simply the first of several beautifully designed storage utilities that we'll see on Leopard. How about automatic synchronization when you plug in an external drive? Snapshots automatically exported to
Read more at ZFS On Leopard: How Cool Is That? [storagemojo.com] Means, Motive & Opportunity: Apple Kills the Media Center PC [storagemojo.com] and the latest ZFS On Mac: Now All-But-Official [storagemojo.com].
And you heard about the native iSCSI support in Leopard, right?