Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
OS X Businesses Operating Systems Sun Microsystems Apple

Sun CEO Says ZFS Will Be 'the File System' for OSX 384

Posted by Zonk from the so-happy-together dept.
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+.'"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Sun CEO Says ZFS Will Be 'the File System' for OSX More

Sun CEO Says ZFS Will Be 'the File System' for OSX

Comments Filter:

  • Booting from ZFS? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rollthelosindice ( 635783 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @11:47AM (#19424387) Homepage
    When ZFS was first mentioned in the same breath as OS X it was pointed out that at the time you couldn't boot off ZFS file systems, so people were thinking it would power external (or secondary) timemachine devices. If it's replacing everything, I'm assuming you can now boot from a ZFS drive? When was this functionality added?

  • Re:The were going to use Reiser (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dch24 ( 904899 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @11:53AM (#19424495) Journal
    As a linux user, I have found good use for ReiserFS. However, I've been asked time and again "why doesn't my iPod work with Windows"? If they move to an open source file system, iTunes for Windows could easily include a ZFS driver. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but some sort of ZFS driver is in the Linux kernel, and Sun is open sourcing Solaris.)

    I like having an mp3 player that doubles as a backup device for my important files. But some of my files are > 4Gb, so FAT32 doesn't work.

  • Is that all? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by o-hayo ( 700478 ) <andy@[ ]x.org ['lbo' in gap]> on Thursday June 07, 2007 @11:57AM (#19424571)
    Maybe some in the know (not me) could fill us (people like me) in... Are there other benefits that will come from moving to ZFS? I'd guess that for the average consumer any performance gain, or loss, won't really make a difference, but what about those running servers or doing heavy video/audio work? Or are there other aspects of this filesystem that will make it that much better than HFS+?

  • Switch all filesystems to ZFS... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by athloi ( 1075845 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @12:00PM (#19424603) Homepage Journal
    Once we're sure it's stable, because it looks like a massive improvement over the 1970s-style file systems we're using now. ZFS is now part of FreeBSD [freebsd.org], Solaris will have ZFS "soon" [itjungle.com] and many Linux distros are also considering it. Good. Let's get to a common standard that's excellent and forget the tedium of these past, less effective file systems.

  • Re:I doubt it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WhiteWolf666 ( 145211 ) <sherwinNO@SPAMamiran.us> on Thursday June 07, 2007 @12:02PM (#19424647) Homepage Journal
    Although Apple hates preemptive disclosure, this goes right along with their "OS X is industrial grade" strategy.

    All over the place Apple advertises that OS X is "Industrial UNIX at the core".

    Now, with ZFS, Apple can advertise having a next-generation omega filesystem to replace the long-in-the-tooth Journaled HFS+, which was significantly better than NTFS.

    NTFS versus ZFS is a joke ;-)

  • Re:oblig... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by eln ( 21727 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @12:06PM (#19424707)
    We had a guy come in a few months ago to give a class on upgrading to Solaris 10, highlighting the differences between Solaris 9 and 10. When he got to the ZFS portion, he really did talk about it like that. He basically described ZFS as the filesystem to end all filesystems, the killer app that would revolutionize computing, end file corruption, and bring about world peace.

    I'm not sure if that's the way they talk about it internally at Sun, but that's how their instructors portray it out in the field.

  • Video Demo of ZFS (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kildurin ( 938538 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @12:08PM (#19424755)
    I know its not on Mac but this shows how easy and powerful ZFS is. I have heard directly from Sun that by Solaris 10 will soon have bootable ZFS either in update 4 or update 5. Remember that the big problem with Sun hardware is that they need firmware support for bootability and that it may be much easier on OS X to make ZFS bootable. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8100808442 979626078 [google.com]

  • Re:The were going to use Reiser (Score:3, Interesting)

    by soleblaze ( 628864 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @12:08PM (#19424761)
    ZFS cannot be added to the linux kernel due to licensing issues. However, there is work being done on a FUSE module for ZFS support. Though I'm not sure if it'll be worth using for anything more than accessing existing ZFS partitions.

  • Re:Switch all filesystems to ZFS... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07, 2007 @12:12PM (#19424817)
    Hmmm... I've been running a linux laptop with SGI's XFS as my root filesystem for the last 5 years, that's a 1990's-era filesystem. Never had a problem with it, including surviving many kernel panics and random emergency power-offs. Seems to be a great filesystem for real engineering-type workloads (lots of files, big files, etc).

    From what I've heard, ZFS is being promoted over a much better (i.e. backwards-compatible) in-house filesystem by a bunch of ex-Sun zealots who now work at Apple...

  • Re:I'm giving odds... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FuturePastNow ( 836765 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @12:12PM (#19424843)
    The first bootable release of ZFS (not "BUILD," but "RELEASE") isn't even due until the Fall.

    OSX 10.5 ain't due 'til Fall, either.

  • Re:oblig... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by djh101010 ( 656795 ) * on Thursday June 07, 2007 @12:17PM (#19424919) Homepage Journal

    We had a guy come in a few months ago to give a class on upgrading to Solaris 10, highlighting the differences between Solaris 9 and 10. When he got to the ZFS portion, he really did talk about it like that. He basically described ZFS as the filesystem to end all filesystems, the killer app that would revolutionize computing, end file corruption, and bring about world peace.
    That's quite a change from about a year ago, when I took the "new features in Solaris10" class; at that time the instructor I had was in no uncertain terms saying it's "not ready for production, wait until later". Apparently we have reached "later"? Or it could be that people have opinions and express them, and aren't all speaking for Sun; I suppose that's possible...

  • Re:Booting from ZFS? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Midnight Thunder ( 17205 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @12:20PM (#19424979) Homepage Journal
    What would prevent you from being able to boot off a ZFS drive? Surely all that needs to be done is for Apple to add ZFS support to their EFI implementation?

  • Re:oblig... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BosstonesOwn ( 794949 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @12:28PM (#19425105)
    as a worker at sun and having used ZFS and playing with it constantly , it is a good File system , I appreciate the little things it has and it has brought data stability to a whole new level. I think personally that this will be a defining moment for ZFS , it will be linux ready soon ( at the same level of stability that the mac will enjoy ) and it will take off and become more of a standard for unix and linux boxes.

    To bad no windows port is available. It would be nice to see my unix drives from windows.

  • Re:oblig... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @12:38PM (#19425245)

    One file system to rule them all.
    I thought that was Plan-9. If they really want to look ahead why not look to plan-9

  • Re:This can, potentially, make upgrades a pain.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by larkost ( 79011 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @12:52PM (#19425485)
    No, you are wrong. Going from HFS+ to ZFS would require some tricky maneuvers to get the data moved over. On the Intel Macs (actually... on Mac's formated with EFI's disk format, but these are only Intel Macs) can volumes be dynamically resized, which would be needed in this case. Even then there would be some real gymnastics involved on a disk over 50% full.

    You are right that ZFS can handle volume size changes live (and HFS+ can sort-of do it), but this does not mean it is a slam-dunk. I would not want to be a product manager in charge of providing the transition code.

  • Re:oblig... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 ) * on Thursday June 07, 2007 @01:01PM (#19425631) Homepage Journal

    it will be linux ready soon


    Aren't there still licensing issues to iron out?

    To bad no windows port is available. It would be nice to see my unix drives from windows.


    Ext2/3 and ReiserFS have all been ported to Windows, so I don't see there would be any problem porting the Linux ZFS implementation as an IFS driver for Windows Vista/XP/2000

  • Re:oblig... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by evil_Tak ( 964978 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @01:03PM (#19425655)
    I must have some nonstandard use case, because I've lost data with both ReiserFS (multiple times, as I optimistically tried newer versions) and XFS.

    Ext3, on the other hand, has been rock solid for me.

  • Re:oblig... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rainman_bc ( 735332 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @01:04PM (#19425663)
    it will be linux ready soon ( at the same level of stability that the mac will enjoy ) and it will take off and become more of a standard for unix and linux boxes.

    Depends - whatcha building? An app server, a web server, a database server, or a file server? Different strokes for different folks, and I'm not clear yet if I'd like the overhead of ZFS on a database server. The jury's still out on ZFS+Oracle...

    I'm not 100% on which file system I'd like. Certainly the integrity of ZFS is quite pleasing for a DBA, questions is if the overhead is worth it...

  • Re:I'm giving odds... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) * on Thursday June 07, 2007 @01:15PM (#19425807)
    If you were a Mac User you realize that Apple does stuff like this a lot, and they are quite good at it too.

    The Move from Classic (OS 9) to OS X forced people to Recompile/Port or Die from obsoleteness modernized almost all the software for Mac OS X. This removed a lot of Old Hacky code from the code base and forced developers to follow a more modern programming style.

    Next it was the move from Power PC to Intel. This once again required a full recompile but this time is assured that the recompile was with their own development tools. So more hacky code was removed and replaced with more standardized system calls.

    Now with ZFS on Mac OS X it is more likely that most things will work just fine with ZFS because Apple Knows what most of the calls to the OS will be. And the bulk of the legicy code has been updated.

    Windows, Linux and traditional Unix OS Devlopers don't normally Break Compatibility so often so their hacks to work around a shortfall in an OLD version of the OS holds threw to the following versions of their software on newer versions of the OS. So migrating OS ZFS on Linux is much more risky then moving to ZFS on OS X.

    But it is a trade off of getting Modern Software and paying more $$$ for the software. or Pay less for the software but make it hard to upgrade to a better system in the future.

  • Re:Oh, great: another DiskWarrior lag (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Guy Harris ( 3803 ) <guy@alum.mit.edu> on Thursday June 07, 2007 @01:29PM (#19425995)

    Please let reasonably well-behaved software that uses resource forks still work.

    You are aware that ZFS - and, for that matter, Solaris's UFS - supports an arbitrary number of named forks in files? (Sun calls them "extended attributes", probably because that's what NFSv4 calls them, but they're really named forks/named streams/whatever you want to call them.)

  • Re:Booting from ZFS? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Skapare ( 16644 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @01:35PM (#19426073) Homepage

    I don't know any of the technology of ZFS, so I can only guess.

    For a boot loader like LILO, it will need to create a list of exact hardware datablocks to read the kernel in from. ZFS might move those blocks around after the "lilo" command built the block map. Then it can't load the kernel.

    For a boot loader like GRUB, it will need to have a read-only subset of the filesystem inside so it can find the kernel image file. That might be doable, but it hasn't been done, yet.

    So create a small boot partition on the first few megabytes of the drive, and make another partition for the rest and let it be a part of the ZFS pool (if ZFS can accept a partition, and not just a whole disk).

    A better option would be to get a computer that has legacy IDE support with bootability, in addition to the main SATA or SCSI support for major hard drives. Then add a Compact Flash adapter to the IDE [addonics.com] port and use a small Compact Flash module to load the kernel from using your favorite boot loader. Or just use an all-SATA mainboard with a different Compact Flash adapter for SATA [addonics.com]. A tiny CF memory module with 16MB or so would be enough to load a nice sized kernel. Or go with a 16GB one and have a copy of /opt and /usr on there as well (structured to work when mounted read-only).

  • The best of Unix? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gilesjuk ( 604902 ) <giles@jones.zen@co@uk> on Thursday June 07, 2007 @01:45PM (#19426185)
    Seems like Apple take some of the best ideas from the Unix world. Really shows the potential of Unix systems if the people who wrote them thought a little more about usability.

  • Re:I'm giving odds... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anarke_Incarnate ( 733529 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @01:55PM (#19426365)
    After 2 months of trying ZFS out in a non-prod environment, we reverted to UFS because ZFS was not as fast on 8k random reads and appeared to use a ton more RAM. In actuality, it used less than perceived but try explaining that to developers and DBAs. UFS will use system RAM for cache and report it as free RAM, then relase it when another process needs it. ZFS does similar things (with worse memory accounting) though if it uses system RAM for cache it reports it as used. A bug had to be squashed in ZFS regarding purging pages of cache when the system requested it back, because it would page out faster than it could account for doing so and cause massive thrashing in RAM. That has been fixed, however.

  • Re:I'm giving odds... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rho ( 6063 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @02:01PM (#19426455) Journal

    Apple has traditionally been in favor of forcing devices, such as not putting arrow keys on the original Mac keyboard.

    Their philosophy tends to be of a benevolent dictator like Linus. Apple is going to make you do some things, and it's for your own good. If you're not happy with it, usually you can do something else if you have the technical skill, or you can just go get a Winders box. This has meant Apple's been able to do things no other company could, and is also why, IMO, they're the top of the heap for consumer OSes.

  • Re:oblig... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @02:13PM (#19426683) Homepage
    From what I understand, the API that Windows filesystem drivers interface with is an undocumented nightmare that's entirely different (but not necessarily 'worse') from the way the rest of the world does it.

    So porting a filesystem as complicated as ZFS could take some time.

  • Re:The were going to use Reiser (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sancho ( 17056 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @02:15PM (#19426733) Homepage

    You mean, the CDDL's restrictive nature.
    Semantics. Each license restricts you from using the other. The GPL is generally more restrictive, but since you have to relicense under the GPL, further restrictions to modified software cannot be added. The CDDL has a restriction (regarding attribution) which must accompany any CDDL derivative work. Therefore, the licenses are incompatible. If the CDDL did not require attribution, or if the GPL allowed further restrictions to be placed upon derivative works, the licenses would be compatible (as I understand the issue, at least).

    Sun's patents prevent a compatible reimplementation of ZFS from being imported into the Linux kernel, so you won't see that, either. The most we'll get is a CDDL-licensed FUSE module. And that sucks.

  • Re:I'm giving odds... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zeromemory ( 742402 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @03:14PM (#19427685) Homepage

    IIRC within a zfs pool (collection of drives) you can make different 'filesystems' mirrored or striped, so you can have a /video that is striped and ultra-fast whereas /home is mirrored and fault-tolerant.
    No, you can't mix and match. When you create a zpool, you get to choose between the equivalents of RAID-0 (striped), RAID-1 (mirrored), and RAID-5/6 (striped with parity). You can nest the various RAID levels, but whatever you choose will apply to all the file systems in your storage pool. If you want to have /video and /home under different RAID levels, you'll need to create two different zpools. Now, this wouldn't be a big issue, as you could normally just partition up your drives to make the separate zpools, but Sun highly recommends allowing ZFS to manage entire disk drives (it's a volume manager along with a file system). If you create zpools out of partitions instead of drives, you lose a lot of neat features like automatic disk cache management and the soon-to-be-merged SMART awareness.

  • Re:Is that all? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kildurin ( 938538 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @06:24PM (#19430579)
    And I would do RAID why? I only use JBODs with ZFS. I find it very strange to use RAID5 arrays with ZFS. We have basically replaced all our RAID5's with ZFS or left them entirely UFS. For most uses, a partition on the disk (usaully just one for the entire drive) is used as the vdev. Thus adding drives is the way to expand a pool.

  • Re:I'm giving odds... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 0xABADC0DA ( 867955 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @06:27PM (#19430631)
    Really?

    NTFS has data checksums to detect and repair corruption caused by any component?
    You can add and remove disk space from an NTFS volume dynamically?
    NTFS does data-level journaling not to mention without the overhead of multiple writes of the data?
    NTFS can use compression without getting horrible fragmented or other negative side effects?
    NTFS snapshots do not affect performance of the normal system?
    NTFS has variable block sizes?
    NTFS is open source and took less than a decade to get support on multiple systems?

    As far as I know that's a big no on all those. I mean NTFS is very complex and has a lot of bullet points, but to claim that ZFS is just 'ntfs with larger address space' is really missing the boat.

  • short memories (Score:3, Interesting)

    by toby ( 759 ) * on Thursday June 07, 2007 @06:49PM (#19430887) Homepage Journal
    they shocked us when they did it off the 10.4 base.

    It did not shock those of us who know that NEXTSTEP was transparently portable to at least four architectures.

  • Re:I'm giving odds... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07, 2007 @07:04PM (#19431063)
    NTFS in Vista answers yes to all those, except the open source / multiple systems one obviously.

    -Steve

  • Re:Is that all? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ms139us ( 723585 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @07:16PM (#19431211)
    Sorry, I was unclear. If you have a RAIDZ pool (consisting of JBODs), you cannot simply add a drive to the pool. Instead, you must add another RAIDZ set to the pool.

    Suppose you start with a pool that is a RAIDZ set with 5x250GB SATA drives (4 data + 1 parity), giving 1TB of data

    3 years later, your needs have grown to 3TB and you need better performance and double parity. The right drives for you now are 1TB SATA4 drives. You really want to get rid of your old and slow SATA array, but your system is 24x7, so you cannot take it offline to do a backup.

    Your only option is to add an array of 3x1TB (2 data+ 1 parity) drives as a RAIDZ set to the pool and keep the old array around until you go out of business or take the system offline for a backup and you cannot move to double parity.

    If your original array gets so old that you can no longer find drives for it, your sunk.

  • Re:I'm giving odds... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by slashthedot ( 991354 ) on Thursday June 07, 2007 @09:28PM (#19432411) Homepage
    A video of guys showing off features of ZFS with USB sticks is available at:
    http://youtube.com/watch?v=1zw8V8g5eT0 [youtube.com]
    There's an english translation available for that somewhere.
    ZFS can do a lot of things with ease that other file systems either can't, or it takes quite an effort.

  • Re: As Homer would say... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by afidel ( 530433 ) on Friday June 08, 2007 @05:03PM (#19444189)
    Actually he proved it with some cool math. Basically there is a certain amount of entropy which must be overcome to initialize a bit of data, multiply that small amount of energy by the number of bits in a 128bit filesystem and you get enough energy to bring all of the earths oceans to a boil. It was one of the best examples for the scale of large numbers I've come across.

Slashdot Top Deals

An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.

Close