Apple Looking at ZFS For Mac OS X 261
Udo Schmitz writes "Apples Filesystem Development Manager, Chris Emura, is looking into porting Sun Microsystems' file system ZFS to OS X. At least this is what Sun's Eric Kustarz states on the ZFS mailing list. Is this a glimpse of hope for all those of us who think HFS+ isn't up to par for a 21st century OS? Next thing you know and they'll rewrite the Finder ..."
Comparison of Filesystems. (Score:5, Informative)
The main advantage for HFS+ users (I mean who's really going to need a 16,000,000 Gigabyte file) would be the introduction of journalling beyond metadata (and even this is unlikely to be useful to most people).
Re:HFS+ vs. UFS vs. ZFS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:HFS+ vs. UFS vs. ZFS (Score:1, Informative)
Yes, OS X allready has UFS, but according to Apple: [apple.com] (unfortunately, zfs would not fix many of these issues)
Re:This is meaningless (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the ars technica low-down on what ZFS does differently and why that's such a good thing.
arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051117-5595.html [arstechnica.com]
Re:Comparison of Filesystems. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:HFS+ vs. UFS vs. ZFS (Score:5, Informative)
It's the same deal with the problem with Classic. All 3 items you link to are for OSX 10.0 and have been fixed since then. The number of UFS problems now is minute compared to then.
Re:YAY! (Score:1, Informative)
So yeah, Mac's still do have Data and Resource forks, nothing bad about them (OS X is less reliant on them though)
And if you ZIP a file, the Resource fork gets carried along, just with a . added to the beginning of the file name to hide it on UNIX systems, and the hidden attribute set on FAT32 drives (like USB thumbsticks) and such.
Intel Macs good oppurtunity to make a clean break (Score:3, Informative)
So now with the Intel Macs and no need for Mac OS 9 support, Apple can tell all their developers that all Universal apps must be able to run on UFS. That way should Apple decide to adopt ZFS it should be a painless transition. Holding on to HFS + with the Intel Macs for this long will hamper any transition into a future filesystem. This will prepare Adobe and Microsoft to write their new Universal versions to be able to accept any type of filesystem and not rely on the resource fork of HFS
That's my 2 cents.
rewriting the Finder (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Comparison of Filesystems. (Score:2, Informative)
Most modern filesystems do some amount of 'defrag' automatically over time. Windows XP w/ NTFS does this, I would bet HFS+ is designed to do this. Of course, if there isn't a lot of free space to play with, the automatic 'opportunistic' defrag has a lot less chance of moving a large file to a bit of contiguous free space. If you can manage it, don't fill your drives to the brim. It will hamper performance, and it will make defrags take MUCH longer if you seriously fragment your files.
The way I understand it, sometimes when you overwrite a file, instead of reusing the same blocks, the FS marks those as free and writes to some currently free blocks, 'defragging' that file.
Re:HFS is big endian (Score:5, Informative)
Currently on intel macs, all disk IO has to be byte swapped, degrading performance. ZFS on the other hand will store data in the machines native format.
While the non-native byte ordering does slow performance this only applies to metadata and not the contents of the files.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Reiser4 would be a better choice (Score:2, Informative)
Re:HFS+ vs. UFS vs. ZFS (Score:3, Informative)
It helps to have knowledgeable moderators, but posts still have to be moderated to be useful for a general audience. In this case, the post in question doesn't tell you much if you don't happen to be very familiar with different file systems for OSX and the compatibility of OSX software with those file systems.
Is the grandparent post flamebait? maybe not. Without minus_273's though, its probably not useful enought to be modded up either. Whether the moderation system is right or wrong, isn't the point here, but the as the guidlines say http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml/ [slashdot.org] in the FAQ, question 5:
By the above def, the grandparent is no more than an average comment that maybe leans a bit towards flamebait and probably shouldn't have been modded up or down.
Re:DeRez, RezWack, SplitForks, etc. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What ever happened to BeFS? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Think you'll get it? (Score:5, Informative)
And yes, I know that Windows NT is sort of descended from VMS. But I've not seen many of the concepts make it up to userland cleanly implemented.
And I'm also aware that VMS is still around. It may not be on life-support yet, but it's clearly in the nursing home already.
Re:Reiser4 would be a better choice (Score:4, Informative)
beyond RAID in data integrity, self-healing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Comparison of Filesystems. (Score:4, Informative)
That said, most desktop users will not notice a big difference between a fragmented, quick-defragment (defrag files, but don't consolidate free space) and full defragmented disk. A typical modern HDD has a 35-40MB/s minimum transfer rate. DV, probably the most resource intensive any normal person bothers with has a measly 25Mb/s = 3,2MB/s. Unless you're suffering from really horrible fragmentation, that should be no problem. Same goes for analog capture with hardware/on-the-fly compression. Yes, there are fringe areas like raw analog video or scientific data but audio capture isn't part of it anymore. And if you're that specific, using a separate tool isn't that big a deal. Servers OTOH might be something, but I imagine most of that is handled by other parts than the OS disk I/O.