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51 Comments
- reallydigginit, on 10/10/2007, -1/+24If the nerds are happy, I'm happy.
- danbedford, on 10/10/2007, -3/+22YEEEESSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!
- ScrabbyDoo, on 10/10/2007, -0/+14Ok as far as I can get my head around it, these are finally the improvements we can see as an end user ...
1) data security, much much much more resistant to corruption. Data redundancy, etc, etc,
2) Harddisks "pooling", where you can easily add and remove harddisks in a "pool" but yet it will appear to you as one logical drive. Eg, you're running out of space, just add a new Harddisk, and boom, it looks as if your old drive magically increased in size.
3) "Striping" means your data get broken up and written on multiple drive simultaneously. Should mean an increase in speed. Eg: if you have two drives, a 512mb file, gets broken into two 256mb chunks, and gets written at the same time, theoretically doubling the write speed.
4) Simple real time disk partition resizing "on the fly"
5) metadata support? (not too sure about this)
Have I got this right? anything else I'm missing? - hisXenocide, on 10/10/2007, -0/+12phew. finally I can transfer all 16 exabites of hentai porn to my mac. damn vhs crowding the whole basement
- BrainInAJar, on 10/10/2007, -1/+12ZFS is awesome, you want it
- Bonzodog, on 10/10/2007, -0/+10Um..Sorry, but it was Sun that created the ZFS filesystem, not Novell.
- Me1000, on 10/10/2007, -2/+11It would be nice if they would make this the default file system for leopard, but I think that is wishful thinking!
(maybe 10.5.1) - kinghajj, on 10/10/2007, -0/+9But it takes a very small amount of space--basically, it only stores the differences. So instead of having a full copy of every file, you have small incremental changes. With today's HD capacities, this will not be a problem.
- Bagration, on 10/10/2007, -3/+11Please excuse my noobishness, but what are the advantages of ZFS over the current OS X file system?
- zodo, on 10/10/2007, -1/+9The best part of ZFS is end to end checksumming...it's virtually impossible to write bad/incorrect data. It repairs itself on the fly...way beyond simple journaling. It also features time-machine-like abilities to roll back files, natively. Absolutely ideal for external hard drives, or system critical applications.
- BrainInAJar, on 10/10/2007, -1/+8wrong.
OpenSolaris running on x86 can boot off ZFS. - BrainInAJar, on 10/10/2007, -2/+9to add to what's been said previously:
on-disk compression support which means faster reads& writes ( I/O bound tasks are sped up by doing less of them)
data checksumming ( no more silent corruption )
snapshotting ( 0 space used for things like timemachine) - KibibyteBrain, on 10/10/2007, -3/+9Almost none for normal users. Server geeks could use some of its benefits like virtual volume management and native virtual storage pools which is useful for large RAID or RAID 'n' type arrays(for creating redundant storage effects similar to the drobo). Its also a 128-bit file system, so it will never ever doom you with capacity, file count, or directory tree size problems.(watch me be made fun of in 20 years for this claim) It also has built in copy on right and cloning facilities for filesystem native version control type stuff. It can also create "lightweight" virtual volumes, so you can basically have a simple ext2/FAT like virtual partition for when simplicity is better for that area of your volume than features.
That said, I'd venture to guess that even the developers and geeks using OSX wouldn't benefit from ZFS much at all as extensions to the current filesystem would work practically the same for these users. So my guess is that Apple thinks it can win over some serious server market share soon. - harlowsmonkeys, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6Using the "summarize" service on my Mac:
ZFS is a new kind of file system that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability.
...ZFS presents a pooled storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions, provisioning, wasted bandwidth and stranded storage. Thousands of file systems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it actually needs.
...It is similar to RAID-5 but uses variable stripe width to eliminate the RAID-5 write hole (stripe corruption due to loss of power between data and parity updates).
...A scrub traverses the entire storage pool to read every copy of every block, validate it against its 256-bit checksum, and repair it if necessary.
...Clones provide an extremely space-efficient way to store many copies of mostly-shared data such as workspaces, software installations, and diskless clients.
...In addition to file systems, ZFS storage pools can provide volumes for applications that need raw-device semantics. - mCanada, on 10/10/2007, -1/+6Hey Apple!. How about OSX 10.5 "Home server" with drobo like capabilities? A "front end" (err back end) for Front Row? A mini Xserve for the masses. You know people are doing this. you've got products that are streaming media to the living room, why not make a product that really centralizes it? Put it in a cube and raid 1 it etc..
- askegg, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4ZFS allows you to create "virtual" drives from the physical space. Different physical drives can be combined into one storage pool, then divided up into virtual drives for use. The virtual drives can be limited in size, or changed dynamically, or grow as required. What's more is their sum does not have to equal the total physical space available - you can overbook space. Add on a few cool features such as journalling, and 128 bit addresses as you have quite a good system. IMHO, it is not up to Novell's NFS system, but it is most of the way there and widely supported.
- DagMX, on 10/10/2007, -2/+6For the common user, the main advantages are:
1)Able to address much much more data.
2)Flexible combined space: If you plug in an extra drive you can have it added and seen as one drive with the existing ones. - krymson, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5For a few glorious seconds i thought this digg was about Appleseed.
- KibibyteBrain, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3No, it has to be both. Programs are only aware of files, not inodes or blocks. They can't be expected to space things out so as to use whole blocks to save data and history and whatnot. The idea behind ZFS and similar file systems is that they can use tricks due to the way the file system works to get you lots of diff space for practically free, or to reduce the cost or stress on the file system performance. They were never intended to correct for programmers making inefficient code.
An example of wasted space ZFS can use that you can't as a programmer:
http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/fragmentation ... - KibibyteBrain, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2No, because almost all of this functionality can be and on your machine much of it is extended in higher level software. Adding it to the FS makes it slightly more efficient and also portable, because its in a hard spec. But the efficiency is of the kind that a user would never ever notice, but it would boost your I/Os/sec, so for the server guy trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of his server while also offering all of these features, he could benefit.
- KibibyteBrain, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Not only that, but it can store these differences in space that things above the file system level do not have access to, i.e. space that would usually be lost due to internal fragmentation. So it CAN in practice store the diffs for free up to a certain point, especially if they are small(which in practice they usually are).
- harlowsmonkeys, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Some apps don't support services. In Safari, simply select the text you want to summarize, and "summarize" should not be greyed out, allowing you to invoke it. Firefox doesn't seem to support it. TextEdit does, so you can copy the text from Firefox to TextEdit, and then summarize.
- zodo, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1That, and case sensitivity would be contrary to apple's traditional ease of use. They're primarily trying to attract people from windows, not *nixes. The average joe is going to be driven nuts by case sensitivity.
- Burn, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1My 'summarize' service is greyed out...how do services work anyway, they seem pretty powerful?
- fjc8, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1ZFS itself is not similar to RAID5; the ZFS RAID-Z mode is what is similar to RAID5.
- fjc8, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1It can only magically repair itself on the fly if there's redundancy. Otherwise, it only reports them.
- BrainInAJar, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2data redundancy is a tuneable ( you can mirror, you can set the properties to a certain zvol to replicate), and to add to your point #1, everything is checksummed so errors can be detected & corrected.
it's also copy-on-write, which means if your computer dies in the middle of a write, you aren't left with garbage blocks - fjc8, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1ZFS does not solve silent corruption problems, it detects them. Then, a human should be able to solve the problem.
It led me to save 200GB of data that was pushed through a bad SATA controller. I once used a computer that had a hard drive that seemingly returned bad data from time to time (reported no SMART errors, only a full test detected the program); ZFS would have detected that. - LordVoldemort, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2"Apple confirms that the original release of Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) will only offer Read-Only ZFS. As a result, no ZFS pools or filesystems can be modified or created under 10.5.0. This developer's preview enables full read/write capability, including the creation/destruction of ZFS pools and filesystems."
WTF? - KibibyteBrain, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1They can't do it, because too much old mac software doesn't work right with case sensitivity. HFS+ supports case sensitivity fine, its just as you say especially Adobe doesn't care. And if Apple tells adobe in October "Surprise, your software is broken on all new Macs" I doubt anyone will be happy over it.
- GreenAlien, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2If all those features are true then this isn't mainly for the server market. Sounds like regular users would benefit greatly.
- pak314, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1How exactly do you store the difference for a file? Are they doing it at a block level? In that case, imagine a text file where one extra character is inserted at the beginning. Now suddenly none of the blocks line up. I don't think differences can be efficiently calculated at a file system level.
- jonahan52, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Nope only read.
- k3vinmartian, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2I would assume that this will be the eventual goal of Apple TV, I hope.
- mshanly, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I was at the FOWA Conference on Wednesday and I was speaking to the repesentatives from Sun who were there, they were under the impression that Leopard's final release would have ZFS Read/Write capabilities. Seems that they were right.
- BlueStarr, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Thanks harlowsmonkeys
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I want a tabbed finder , can someone ring up steve jobs and tell him to add that please thanks
- nufoto, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2Well its a start!..hopefully they will further its development in future releases....baby steps!
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Thank you, Apple & Sun! Finally a file system worthy of the new millennium.
- Codee, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Sounds like a really good thing. I'm looking forward to the new OS.
- GreenAlien, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1So the average user wouldnt benefit from extra security, less corruption, easier to add/remove harddisks and i dare say other features not mentioned in that comment?
- k3vinmartian, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Oh Snap!
- HappyScrappy, on 10/10/2007, -3/+3Silent corruption won't be solved by this, corruption, if it happens, rarely happens in the I/O system. Your hard drive itself uses a massive Reed-Solomon ECC code which not only FINDs corruption, but corrects it too.
Snapshotting takes space. It's absurd to think that you can store more data (like multiple revisions of a file) without it taking up space! - pak314, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1How can checksums make it impossible to write bad or incorrect data unless you read back data after every write? If that were true performance would probably drop by 30 to 40% due to the extra work.
- HappyScrappy, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1Most programs are not smart enough to only change portions of a file. Especially on Mac OS X. They open a file, and flatten their entire object database into it again. So it only shows up with a context-sensitve text-diff, which ZFS isn't going to do as those don't work on non-text files. And they're not even practical on large files? How long do you think it takes to do a context diff on two 1GB files so you can save only the diffs?
The right way to do generational history is to make the programs aware of it, not to try to hack it in behind the scenes. - evensong, on 10/10/2007, -2/+1So... this will let me reinstall or convert my current Leopard 9a559 install to ZFS?
Someone please say yes. - signal15, on 10/10/2007, -4/+1Hopefully with Leopard they will make the default file-system case sensitive. And hopefully ZFS is only available in case sensitive form. For those of us who compile and use apps that were written for other Unix-like OS's, case-insensitivity can really screw things up.
The thing that sucks, is that developers never test on case sensitive filesystems. So Adobe products have all sorts of issues (which they've told me they will never fix) and Entourage has some strange issues also. - BlueStarr, on 10/10/2007, -6/+2@Bagration
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/whatis/ (I'm not reading all that crap)
Someone give us the condensed version. - dagamer34, on 10/10/2007, -6/+2As of now, no operating system is able to boot from a ZFS partition. You'll have to stick with HFS+ for now.
- rspeed, on 10/10/2007, -8/+2***** yeah! ...Seaking?
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