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57 Comments
- WiseWeasel, on 10/12/2007, -2/+50I'm not sure if it's real or not, but I hope it is. ZFS support in OSX would be awesome. ZFS allows you to do things like make a snapshot of an entire filesystem, and track revisions to it. It allows functionality such as regressing to your computer's state on a previous date, while only taking up enough storage space to store the changes in the filesystem, and not the whole thing. For example, with current filesystems, to go back to a previous state, you actually have to have a complete backup of the filesystem from the particular date you want. ZFS would allow you to only store the changes in your filesystem since a particular date, which takes up much less storage space. This will allow things like Time Machine to work without having your entire filesystem backed up multiple times at various intervals.
Therefore: digg - caliform, on 10/12/2007, -1/+46I hate to shoot your comment down. The latest build seeded to developers has a 'ZFS' option in the Disk Utility. Guess when the next build is due? January tenth - Macworld, I believe. I am quite sure they will use ZFS. Also, I don't think there will be a bootable issue like a lot of ZFS porting projects; the EFI firmware volume bootstrap allows OS X to start from a ZFS volume.
edit: see the insanelymac forums Leopard section for more info and screenshots of the latest build, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS for more info on ZFS. - pygmalion, on 10/12/2007, -2/+25"This will allow things like Time Machine to work without having your entire filesystem backed up multiple times at various intervals."
That's not how Time Machine currently works on HFS+.
The difference with ZFS is that the technology is implemented at the filesystem level, rather than the operating system living on top of it. Not only does a filesystem level approach provides better performance (in theory), it's probably more reliable as well. - maxplanar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+22If this is true, it's big, BIG news. ZFS in OSX would be fabulous.
- anonym41414, on 10/12/2007, -1/+21Let's be a little more precise here. Mac OS X certainly CAN fragment. It's just that the operating system (independent of what filesystem you're using) automatically de-fragments files on the fly. Any time a file is opened, the system runs down a short checklist (is the file smaller than 20 MB, does the file have more than 8 extents on the disk, is the file not read-only) and if it passes, Mac OS X relocates the file's blocks to a contiguous part of the disk automatically. That is, it de-fragments it.
Why the 20 MB limit? Two reasons. First, any file bigger than 20 MB probably won't give you a problem if it's fragmented. You'll be reading data from it in such big chunks that the extra seeks won't be harmful. Second, relocating a very large file would cause a spike in disk I/O that can slow the system down, particularly on a laptop.
So typical users don't need to worry about file fragmentation at all, period. If you have a very specific application, you might; say if you're doing a ton of video I/O. But that's rarely a problem these days, as I/O hardware is fast enough that it can sustain playback of compressed (DV or HDV or DVCPRO-HD) video even if it's pretty well fragmented. - pkulak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17If this is true, it's huge. The best feature of 10.5 yet, by far.
- exiva, on 11/08/2007, -3/+20You can't screenshot in the OSX installer.
- Ireland, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14Here's my favorite quote from Sun's ZFS project leader on the subject (with a little extra detial):
ZFS is a 128-bit file system, which means it can store 18 billion billion (18 quintillion) times more data than current 64-bit systems. The limitations of ZFS are designed to be so large that they will never be encountered in practice. Project leader Bonwick said, "Populating 128-bit file systems would exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage. You couldn't fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans.
Fantastic! It's this type of radical thinking that companies like Microsoft need a good dose of. I'm glad Apple is fully aware of ZFS. - otomo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15zfs works by keeping tracks of the filesystem at the block level.
Say you have /foo/bar and /foo/other saved. You take a snapshot, zfs keeps track of each block as it currently is. Now you delete /foo/other. The current version only keeps track of the deleted blocks, remember /foo/other still exists on disk.
Now you snapshot again and write to a part of /foo/bar. The only changes are what was written and is kept as the original blocks (if any) and the new blocks of data.
Starting to see how cool/simple and rather intuitive it is? There is more to zfs, they are adding in encryption, which is also awesome because each block would be encrypted and then sent to disk for writing. This is great because you don't always want to trust what you write to.
You can also get compression at the block level, checksums of the data, which means if a disk fails and it is mirrored, but you never access the data, the next access will read both blocks checksums. Then if one is wrong it will read the data for both, re-checksum the data and copy the one that checksums correct.
Again, simple in how it works, but extremely powerful. Take a clone of a snapshot and you can boot off that. I have this setup on my home fileserver which is solaris 10 06/06, I can boot to any day of how the server was setup if I want to. I am SUPER glad now that both dtrace and zfs are in two of my favorite os's. - iNunchuk, on 10/12/2007, -6/+16On a completely unrelated note, I think that the people at Adobe know something about the new UI that Leopard will be using, the setup to install the system is much darker than that expected...it cant just be a coincidence that they like the color black...(the same black that Apple likes).
- bbatsell, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11No, the file system does not affect that.
- maxplanar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10My guess is that ZFS will first come to OSX as a supported filesystem for non-boot drives. Boot support isn't there yet in ZFS, AFAIK.
- geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9It can do many things, but let's take an example. Let's say it takes a "snapshot" every hour of your entire filesystem for the last 6 hours. Let's say you mess up, you delete a bunch of directories. No problem, just choose one of the snapshots and copy the files over from the snapshot. It takes a snapshot of your entire drive every hour with no noticeable performance hit.
This is what we have been doing on servers for years, ZFS + OS X makes this greatness available to the masses. - iNunchuk, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Hey, if ZFS is the new file system, then that's great...now if only Windows would support it too, then we'd all be happy.
And yes, it does make much sense with Time Machine. I just wish that person could provide an entire screen shot, would make it more worth it to see it. - Elranzer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Anyone know if it is a case-sensitive filesystem or not? Many OSX apps fail to run if you use the case-sensitive version of HFS+. Adobe Acrobat being one of them...
- ZachPruckowski, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5The advantage of ZFS is that you can do it on the block level instead of the file level. So a 3-4 MB music file that only has the metadata changed would only have about 64kb extra added to the filesystem, instead of copying the changed file again.
Additionally, it has interesting pooling capabilities, like where you can add a drive to a RAID 0 and make it a RAID 5 without reformatting. - Ireland, on 11/08/2007, -0/+5"You can't screenshot in the OSX installer"
..but you can screenshot straight from Leopards Disk Utility app. (RAID tab) from within the booted OS. I can confirm that the screenshot is indeed real I just checked myself in the Latest built and I saw exactly that "Zettabyte File System (ZFS).
There's some very interesting information on ZFS here: http://www.sun.com/2004-0914/feature/ - JewFro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5arstechnica discusses Time Machine and the future of the file system on Mac OS X.
Really informative.
http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2006/8/15/4995/p2 - anonym41414, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9You can't boot ANY computer off of a ZFS filesystem right now.
Besides, the really cool stuff in ZFS will help you more with user storage than with your root partition. In fact, this might be enough to take us back to the days of a small boot partition just for /System with the rest of the disk being dedicated to a ZFS storage pool. If you run out of space on your first internal drive, you can just pop in another, add it to the pool, and keep working without having to think about what lives on which disk.
(Not having worked with ZFS, I have no idea how it handles a failed disk in a non-RAID, non-mirrored storage pool. I expect it would be completely disastrous.) - thejadedmonkey, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Most software will work fine. Some serious things (perhaps Onyx) might need to be re-written, but 99% of the apps you use on a daily basis won't even need an update.
- enicholas, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Suppose you have a 500GB hard drive, and you run out of room. You buy a second 500GB hard drive. With "normal" filesystems, you only have two options: you can format the second drive with its own filesystem, which makes management of the two drives a pain in the ass (you probably want a virtual 1000GB drive rather than two 500GB drives, so you don't have to shuffle data back and forth). You could also choose to stripe the two drives together into a 1000GB drive, but it requires wiping all of the data on both drives.
In ZFS on the other hand, you can add a new hard drive and it just adds to the amount of storage you have. So you would have a 500GB filesystem + 500GB of unused space. You could extend your current filesystem to occupy any or all of the extra 500GB, with no need to reformat. - geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -7/+10You've been able to do this on linux with LVM for years, but having such a beast on a system with a great UI is pretty commendable to say the least. It's like windows but with free enterprise-grade software. I'm sure there are some other nice features of ZFS, for example I heard it allows for faster RAID performance if the XOR is a bottleneck..
- hypercrypt, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
- otomo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It works right now, but you need a small /grub partition that is ufs to bootstrap things along.
Update 3 of Solaris 10 will allow native booting off of zfs filesets. - clord, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Existing software will get the new feature for free if it is implemented at the file-system level. No need to read or write special metadata, for example.
- Xilon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3so that's what ZFS stands for...
Nice to see an upgrade from HFS+ :) - diggapleaze, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3all it takes is an initramfs to boot into the ZFS. It's not that hard to do. So most likely, if Apple is going to use ZFS, it *will* be for both "bootable" and non-bootable drives. I put "bootable" in quotes because, again, it's being "booted" from the initram fs rather than straight from the EFI.
- shadownight, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Direct link (French website): http://mac4ever.com/news/27485/zettabyte_sur_leopard/
- otomo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2And I even made a screenshot of the latest (december build) creating a new pool, and then a zfs filesystem. The disk utility FORCES you to create a raid set, but I just wanted a concatenated version for testing.
It is here, but buggy. First zfs I made caused a kernel panic. Soooo not quite ready yet.
http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/8808/picture3ao8.png - WiseWeasel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Looks like Apple's been working on this since April:
http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2006/4/27/3777 - nixfu, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Can you build a mac osx system with a tiny little /boot partition and the rest of your root disk as zfs?
- geekoid, on 11/08/2007, -0/+1Black is the absence of all colour. There is only one black. All others are shades of grey.
- Ireland, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3The same black that Apple likes? ..and I'd like to add that this is a Beta, notice we still see the blue Aqua present in CS3, unlike iTunes 7 (hint hint)!
- drumnbass, on 11/08/2007, -8/+8Please excuse my ignorance in this area also (and - yes - I've tried gaining an understanding from the wikipedia entry), but does this mean that software written for existing versions of OS X won't run if you choose to use the ZFS file system?
- sfty, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2wow, that took a while! reported before, w/o screenshot though: http://digg.com/apple/Latest_Leopard_build_has_ZFS_capability
- Maverick18x, on 11/08/2007, -2/+1@guitarhcp:
I'm a web designer and if you really wanna know I can try to explain the whole black thing. When you're looking at a computer screen the black and white points are relative. Your brightest bright = 100% white and your darkest dark = 100% black. A screen that has better contrast will get an even brighter white and an even darker black.
This means in the graphic design world, black becomes the darkest grey a designer uses and white becomes the lightest grey -- it's all relative. There ARE different blacks because black is the absolute absence of all light, which technically can never be achieved. Hope I explained that ok?
And I know, that has nothing to do with ZFS in Leopard... - HappyScrappy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1ZFS is case sensitive. Which is yet another reason why Apple will not be switching to it.
- Shorties, on 10/12/2007, -5/+4Ok cool that does sound better, and can I assume it will not fragment as much as NTSF or Fat32?
- diggeasytiger, on 11/08/2007, -2/+1no : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_file_system
- Shorties, on 11/08/2007, -14/+13Ok for the noob (Me) what is the Zettabyte File System? And why should I like it over the current mac file system?
- nofxjunkee, on 11/08/2007, -3/+1@guitarhcp:
My sister is in interior design and would gladly explain about different blacks to you... sadly I'm in computer science and I tend to think more like you. Just accept that we're wrong on this one and there are different kinds of black, you don't really want to hear about it. - exiva, on 11/08/2007, -10/+8I have to digg this down for inaccuracy.
The title is correct, ZFS is in Leopard. *But* you cannot use it as the main partition type from the installer... yet, if at all. So it is not The file system of choice in Leopard.
http://exiva.net/per/DSC03347.JPG - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2http://www.duggmirror.com
Edit: I forgot that the link for this digg article was for a freaking blog post instead of the actual article. Should have known before commenting.. - guitarhcp, on 11/08/2007, -8/+5Not to be an ass....but how could it *not* be the same black?
- thejadedmonkey, on 11/08/2007, -16/+11OS X doesn't fragment.
- Sairgem, on 11/08/2007, -12/+5Di...did you actually take a picture of your monitor instead of taking a screenshot?
- SirBryce, on 10/12/2007, -8/+1I bet a "special" color iPod would probably have sold for 5 times that much, at least.
- manitoba98xp, on 11/08/2007, -14/+7@datcrazydj
You could have read caliform's comment (first response to first comment). He provided the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
Even if he hadn't you could have Googled it, looked it up in Wikipedia, etc. So yes, you _do_ come off as stupid. - WiseWeasel, on 10/12/2007, -10/+2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zfs
[edit]D'oh, beat to it... [/edit] - datcrazydj, on 10/12/2007, -17/+9Sorry if I come off as stupid, but what the hell is ZFS?
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