Apple Looking To Port ZFS for Mac OS X?

[QPlot]

Hey, the average consumer only cares about the specs. Hit them with HFS+ can only store 2^63 bytes on a disk while ZFS can store 2^64 bytes. TWICE AS MUCH! That'll wow 'em.

u joking, right? No I can't see twice, I only see it jumps from 63 to 64 which is not much in MY common sense.

 

[ifjake]

It is open source, so I'm sure Apple would be quite involved themselves at tweaking it should they decide to use it, adding Mac OS specific extras to it. As long as on the consumer level this leads to a speed increase or some kind of security advantage or something good that people don't have to have huge servers with enormous amounts of disk space to actually see an improvement, then go for it.

I'm wondering now that Apple's gone x86 if that means there could be an increased variety of compatible open source technologies for them to at least experiment with. Of course, I know absolutely nothing about how open source works.

 

[QPlot]

"if a user was creating 1,000 files a second it would take them about 9,000 years to reach the limit of the number of files."

ok, really convincing. I guess from now on, all I'm gonna do is to create millions of millions of files then.








Just to see how good is this beast. I got to test it somehow

 

[joebells]

u joking, right? No I can't see twice, I only see it jumps from 63 to 64 which is not much in MY common sense.

2^2 equals 4
2^3 equals 8
2^4 equals 16
2^5 equals 32
.....
2^63 equals 9,223,372,036,854,775,808
2^64 equals 18,446,744,073,709,551,616

 

[miketcool]

u joking, right? No I can't see twice, I only see it jumps from 63 to 64 which is not much in MY common sense.

2^2 equals 4
2^3 equals 8
2^4 equals 16
2^5 equals 32
.....
2^63 equals 9,223,372,036,854,775,808
2^64 equals 18,446,744,073,709,551,616

You just got schooled!

I don't think the question is so much whether or not ZFS will be supported, which it probably will. The question is, will this become the default filesystem for OS X. Is apple going to port this? Or is Apple going to support it and it's own Apple flavor of it?

As for the video, that was pretty cool, but can't auto checksumming be built into the current filesystem? Or is the way it's implemented now just too slow?

 

[BenRoethig]

The more file systems that are compatible with OSX, the better.

 

[electronboy]

Enough Time?

Is Apple thinking of implementing ZFS in Leopard? I would suspect that this was under way for quite some time if that is their goal. If they are just starting dicusssions with Sun regarding this then hopefully they are thinking about integrating into the next release AFTER Leopard.

 

[ChrisA]

Apple's changing their file system with 10.5?

Absolutly no way could ZFS be ready in time for 10.5. If Apple put some effort into this and paid Sun to help. My estimate is that it wouls take a year at least. It's taken Sun that long to make ZFS available in the "real world" after it was anounced and running in the lab.

Also ZFS is not something you would run on a small 250MB boot disk. THis is meant for someone with a rack of 5, 7 or 200 drive spindles. After all the "Z" is for zetabyte.

 

[ChrisA]

You just got schooled!

I don't think the question is so much whether or not ZFS will be supported, which it probably will. The question is, will this become the default filesystem for OS X. Is apple going to port this?

ZFS is not something you put on a boot drive. Even on Solaris they boot off UFS while ZFS is reserved for the disk arrays

I suspect the first place you will see ZFS and Apple mixed will be on the servers that run iTunes or .Mac those are places that really do need many terrabyts of storage.. ZFS is big, complex and NOT something you could but on a 80GB drive in a macbook, well at least whithout maybe 18 to 24 months of work

 

[tcmcam]

Expand your thinking

ZFS is big, complex and NOT something you could but on a 80GB drive in a macbook, well at least whithout maybe 18 to 24 months of work

Well, gee, this is like saying a few years back "I'll never have 2GB of RAM in a laptop".... c'mon...

OK, so ZFS is not for your boot drive. BUT, what about XServe? What about a PowerMac with 2 to 4 hard drives using RAID-Z for video editting work? I'd love "Instant" snapshots for that!!

I think Apple's challenge is this:
1 - Make it "Apple" like: Nice GUI to manage it (integrated into Disk Utility), most of the options should be auto-magic. Right now, only a Unix geek could love that command line interface.
2 - Who say's it doesn't make sense for your boot drive down the road? Who says that disk drives won't get smaller and cheaper. Maybe 2+ HDD will become standard in computers in the next 3-4 years.
3. - This is NOT for Leopard. This is for later, but that's fine.

Let's face it, Apple needs more Enterprise level tools, this is a step in the right direction.

 

[Doctor Q]

My read of the Wikipedia article was that only the metadata is endian agnostic-- the files themselves are "just an array of bytes" that the application needs to sort out.

You are correct, as I understand it. Filesystems don't concern themselves with the content of file data, only the access to it.

 

[QPlot]

Well, gee, this is like saying a few years back "I'll never have 2GB of RAM in a laptop"..

Let's face it, Apple needs more Enterprise level tools, this is a step in the right direction.

point taken.

 

[yac_moda]

WAY COOOL HOTdiggityDOGGIES !!!

Heavey metals game MACchines comin our WAY COOLNESS

MACs for audio studios that YOU can just click to record AND LEAVE IT ON ALL DAY

Remember the news from Segate that they are about to start shipping nearly terra bit HDs

 

[SiliconAddict]

Apple's changing their file system with 10.5?

doubt it. IMHO I think its too late in the development game to be doing that. Keep in mind that a feature complete 10.5 is going to be released to developers on Aug. If we are only hearing about TALKS now I would doubt that it will make Leopard. 10.6...maybe.

 

[matticus008]

The file system normally has APIs to do file lookups - if that API doesn't have a "case-insensitive" option, it can be much slower to find a particular file (you might have to write code to get all of the file names, and do a case-blind compare to see if it is the one you want).

Right. That's what I'm saying. If the filesystem is case-insensitive, you CAN'T have case-sensitivity and therefore don't need the option in code, because a case-insensitive file system will return the same for File and file and filE, etc. I think that I'm just having a mental block at communicating this textually.

 

[asphalt-proof]

Which is why we didn't report the REALLY gory aspects of this story, which as you can see is coming out in the forums (like I hoped). File Systems are indeed a very technical thing, so technical people will get excited about this news and see it's significance. Others of us will just wait until it actually practically impacts us.

My take on this story is that basically, Apple is looking ahead and seeing that HFS+ will eventually run out of breathing room for the developers at apple to build on top of. ZFS has a ton of really nice features already built into it, and it is a 128-bit file system whereas HFS+ is only 32bit. ZFS has more "legs", so Apple is basically looking towards the future.

Ok I didn't understand much of the wiki except that it appears to be a very fast file system. Could some of you more informed people let us know what, practically, we could expect from such a change in OSX? (if this question has been asked before I apologize, I never made it past the 1st page.)

 

[supremedesigner]

Absolutly no way could ZFS be ready in time for 10.5. If Apple put some effort into this and paid Sun to help. My estimate is that it wouls take a year at least. It's taken Sun that long to make ZFS available in the "real world" after it was anounced and running in the lab.

Also ZFS is not something you would run on a small 250MB boot disk. THis is meant for someone with a rack of 5, 7 or 200 drive spindles. After all the "Z" is for zetabyte.

Actually, what if they already talked with Sun like 2 years ago and been workin' on it ever since? But that is interestsing...

 

[ChrisA]

Massive RAID systems that are easy to setup and manage. For example if you run out of space you simply buy a few more drives and add then to the "storage pool". You can specify a policy about how the disks are to be distributed between redundancy, speed and "hot spares" "Masive" meaning many, many tarabytes. But not even Solaris can boot off ZFS, Don't expect Mac OS to lead Solaris on this.

 

[Les Kern]

One of ZFS's features is "adaptive endian-ness", meaning that you can use a disk with a ZFS filesystem on either a big-endian or little-endian platform and it's portable back and forth.

With its variable-size adaptive block sizes and constant-time directory operations, it promises great performance too.

My partner and I just developed an app that uses 448-bit encryption, and struggled to make the WIN end work properly just BECAUSE of "big endian" - "little endian" issue. It added a lot of extra code that I felt wasn't REALLY needed... we may have to sepaprate the platforms as it matures.
I wish interoperabilty were the norm.

 

[Demoman]

i seriously hope they do this as the ability to swap files between OSX and Solaris on a mac owuld be awsome
not to mentionall of ZSF's l33tness

Either you have not used Solaris, or Solaris has improved greatly. I administrated a 2.0-2.4 system for a few years. The day I moved on was one of the happiest in my life.

 

[ChrisA]

You are correct, as I understand it. Filesystems don't concern themselves with the content of file data, only the access to it.

That's right in UNIX-like OSes. Some other OSes did get inside the files. But that's history. Fr example VMS treats binary and test files differently andthe file system knows about thing like line termination. UNIX has always had the idea that a file is just a stream of bytes left to the application layer to interpet. But to many users of Mac OS the OS and the application are the same. I think Mac OSX users then to think of the "Finder" as part of the OS and not just an applacation.

We should make it plain here. ZFS would be part of Darwin. The open source core of Mac OS, it's not something you'd see in "point and click land" except maybe some options in system preferences.

It's also not something the average home user would want. Just read the name: Users are just starting tho think about disks in terms of "TB". "ZB" is hugly larger 1E21 is a _huge_ number. All of the information currently stored in the whole world does not add up to 1ZB.

 

[nagromme]

Sounds great but the real killer would be Solaris --the BEST OS on Earth-- with Aqua --the BEST interface on Earth-- to replace the current Mac OS X (much as Mac OS X replaced Mac OS 9).

Are you referring to the underlying Darwin UNIX, vs. the UNIX beneath Solaris? Or are you referring to the whole OS top to bottom and prefer Solaris?

Either way, I'm curious about the benefits of Solaris over OS X. (And/or the anticipated benefits of the NEXT version of Solaris vs. Leopard.)

 

[daveL]

ZFS is not something you put on a boot drive. Even on Solaris they boot off UFS while ZFS is reserved for the disk arrays

I suspect the first place you will see ZFS and Apple mixed will be on the servers that run iTunes or .Mac those are places that really do need many terrabyts of storage.. ZFS is big, complex and NOT something you could but on a 80GB drive in a macbook, well at least whithout maybe 18 to 24 months of work

Solaris will boot off of ZFS as of the Solaris 10 update at the end of this year. There are many features of ZFS that make sense on single disk systems, as described in earlier posts.

 

[Doctor Q]

My partner and I just developed an app that uses 448-bit encryption, and struggled to make the WIN end work properly just BECAUSE of "big endian" - "little endian" issue. It added a lot of extra code that I felt wasn't REALLY needed... we may have to sepaprate the platforms as it matures.
I wish interoperabilty were the norm.

Think how much nicer the world would be if DOS, Unix, and Mac OS had all started out with the same line terminator. Byte-oriented ASCII or ISO-8859-n files wouldn't need conversions at all.

When cave men used teletypes to talk to their computers, carriage return and line feed were both needed because they represented distinct horizontal and vertical movements of the print head, but it's been a while since we needed that. And I've always thought the Mac legacy of using CR rather than either CRLF or LF was misguided. WHY did they do that? Just to be different?

Of course, if we're wishing, we could wish that Unicode had been used from the start and that processors all used the same endianness.

 

[yac_moda]

To help MacRumors in their time of struggle for stories:

http://www.engadget.com/2006/05/01/macbook-pros-overheating-due-to-thermal-grease/

The story of the DAY is APPLE's stock dropping LIKE A ROCK because of free Napster downloads