Apple Looking at ZFS For Mac OS X

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 ..."

Slashdot is Getting Better Again

[LakeSolon]

A story that consists of a link to wikipedia and a mailing list posting about an OS possibly (maybe, potentially) switching filesystems.

Beats the heck out of story about a blog posting that's just a regurgitation of an MSNBC article that doesn't know what the frack it's talking about.

Re:Comparison of Filesystems.

[lokedhs]

I think the major advantage is the fast snapshotting and cloning. It uses copy-on-write so that it doesn't take more space than what you actually change.

Imagine being able to take really fast working copies of whatever you're doing and be able to simple use the old versions by cd'ing to the old clone.

That's certainly what I would use ZFS for. The rest of the stuff, pooling and mirroring and stuff is less interesting in my laptop. :-)

What Apple Is Looking For

[rpk]

There are probably two things that Apple would be looking for in ZFS: a shiny feature they can point to for their enterprise and video production markets, and for the consumer market, the promise of a simple, reliable way to back up and grow the storage of a Mac without have to worry about mounting/copying/moving volumes, managing backups, etc.

Re:one word

[rpk]

Yeah, it's pretty clear that for heavy-duty use, HFS+ is not really the way to go. With ZFS, Apple can build on what Sun has done, while at the same time they don't have to touch HFS+ at all, or fix all the it-doesn't-quite-work-like-HFS+ issues that UFS has. It makes a lot more sense for them to get ZFS to "just work" than to put that work into the existing UFS implementation.

Re:Comparison of Filesystems.

[croddy]

Also -- hard links. One would be hard pressed to find a filesystem with poorer hard link support than HFS+, except those that don't support links at all.

Re:Comparison of Filesystems.

[ylon]

With the number of hard drive failures that I've seen in our region recently (being that I am part of a group of consultants that works across the region and we've seen well over 100 hard drives fail within the last 3 months with bad sectors and such, seems very odd, but something is up as it ranges in brands and from home consumers to very beefy servers) I would say that ZFS is a huge benefit for anything ranging from laptops to servers. I would love to have continual failure monitoring for bad blocks and such. I am extremely excited about this as it will also allow the pooling of storage space across my personal office. Also, does it function similarly to the Google FS or other global filesystems that help to create redundancy across the pool? That would be exceptionally valuable. I thought that I'd read about ZFS actually functioning as a disconnectable file system as well that could "sync up" when reconnected to the network, but perhaps that is from some of my other filesystem exploration.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Comparison of Filesystems.

[foniksonik]

As a part time graphics guy, this feature would make life much better.... I periodically have to save very large files after having made the smallest of changes... a typo for example... and yet saving the document takes as long as if I had made a full copy of the file.

I would love for the FS to do snapshot saves with incrementals and checkpoints and rollback, instead of having each application do it. This provides unlimited undos potential with actual stored versions... a true 'history' of the file, available for review.

Implementing this functionality at a FS level will make it practical whereas now you have to rely on a program like Photoshop to create a 'scratch disk' that takes up huge amounts of RAM and physical space, making for an overall unwieldy document memory footprint the application has to traverse and manipulate as you make changes.

If they do this and can provide Application level hooks that are easy to implement, it will put OS X back on top for large file manipulation application developers like Adobe... simply because the performance benefits will showcase their applications so much better than the alternatives.

Apple should just buy SUN

[adam1101]

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense for Apple to buy SUN. Their products nicely complement each other. Apple is strong in the consumer market and in the creative sector, SUN has good presence in the enterprise, tech and finance sectors. Apple has great brand value and knows marketing like no other computer vendor, SUN has technical excellence, but it's been struggling in the last years to actually sell their stuff. Their products portfolios have little overlap, and together they offer a very complete spectrum of computer products.

Mac OS X is a great consumer OS, but performance at the high end is sub-par. For servers, Solaris is fast and scalable, has nifty features like ZFS and DTrace, but the UI is pretty crude. Imagine a merger of these. Looking at their market [yahoo.com] caps [yahoo.com], Apple can afford it.

Re:Comparison of Filesystems.

[BrokenHalo]

Hmmm. Curious survey results there. Although I don't fall into those categories (my next computer will be built by myself, and it will run Linux as usual) I'm not entirely surprised by a preference for Mac. But the difference there is so big, the immediate suspicion that comes to my mind is that someone has been stacking votes...

Re:Think you'll get it?

[lokedhs]

I think it's a quantum leap. Not because of the snapshotting or error checking, but the thing that really makes ZFS a completely different beast is that it is (to my knowledge) the first file system (or should I say "storage technology"?) that actually joins two traditionally separate concepts: file systems and volume management.

Thanks to this, a lot of interesting stuff becomes possible, such as the fast file system creation which is demonstrated in this very cool demo [opensolaris.org].

If you don't consider ZFS a quantum leap in file system technology, I wonder what it would take for you to use that expression (set aside for the moment the people who argue that "wuantum leap" should in fact mean the opposite :-) ).

Re:Great if it's true

[greed]

Also imagine Disk Utility having a popup to format a Disk that made users choose between:

Don't confuse possibilities with defaults. There's two mechanisms already established for giving advanced users more choices: Option-click a control or menu item to get more choices. Or a show-advanced-options preference without a GUI interface that you can turn on with the "defaults write" command.

Plus the whole "Advanced Options" kind of button....

Re:Apple should just buy SUN

[mhollis]

I like your comment. And the reason why I like it so much has to do with my (past) experience on a University system. Universities developed servers and file sharing with Macs using Sun's servers because Apple really didn't have a server. I mean you could put a Mac (usually an older one) on a network and tell it to share files with everyone but it lacked lots of stuff you would expect to have in a server and it tended to be pretty slow.

I would argue that it was the University exposure that lead Apple to offer Ethernet on Macs. Appletalk was great and people hooked themselves up very quickly with Appletalk (you could buy cabling at your local Radio Shack or use almost any twisted-pair cabling, including electrical cables) but Ethernet was a lot faster and more reliable. I'll bet the folks who developed 10 Base-T Ethernet were thinking Appletalk when they came up with the design for the connector and the twisted pair.

But I digress...

I did a fair amount of work with a hard Science department and they all had Suns as servers. They were strictly Sun Unix for the geeks and they developed systems and applications on that model. But for those who actually had to function in an office environment, the Macs were standard. They used Microsoft's Office for memos, reports and spreadsheets and TeX for document publishing. Everything you did worked.

Frankly, I think this legacy is part of the reason why Apple got fascinated with Unix again (that, and Jobs' NeXt company). It would be a good marriage. Apple's X-Serve RAIDs with Sun. Sweet!

Re:Think you'll get it?

[TheRaven64]

but the thing that really makes ZFS a completely different beast is that it is (to my knowledge) the first file system (or should I say "storage technology"?) that actually joins two traditionally separate concepts: file systems and volume management.

I can tell you grew up in the UNIX world. Everything I read about ZFS reminds me very much of VMS. Twenty years ago. If you read the UNIX Hater Handbook (published 12 years ago), then you will find a very nice rant about how the UNIX concept of partitions is a huge step back from what VMS offered. Now, over a decade later, it seems someone has listened.