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Apple Seeds ZFS Read/Write Developer Preview 1.1 for Leopard

I'm positive that ZFS has, and always will be an integral part of time-machine. The reason it was "pulled" was because the thunder was stolen from Job's by the Sun exec. Always been there... nothing to see here.
 
I had figured that Apple had decided to rip ZFS out of Leopard because it was not "ready for prime time". But this implies they are only delaying ZFS until after the the initial October release of Leopard. This is great. Once these terrabyte drive become common and people start having stacks of them ZFS will really be the only way to go.

What I can't wait to see is the user land GUI Apple builds for ZFS. Sun's user land ZFS stuff is horrible. no worse than that. I'm sure, given time Aple will show us the ZFS can be conceptually easy even for "the masses"

Anyone who wants to play with ZFS right now: Buy VMware fusion and install Solaris inside Fusion. ZFS works just fine in Solaris Solaris is free so there is nothing stopping you.
 
I hope on Friday, Apple finally makes Leopard the home page with tons of new information and the final feature list. I bet the lights are on at Apple 24x7 to get this cat out of the door.

Someone said that Time Machine doesn't work with ZFS. Is that true?
 
Ahh yes. People whining very recently about ZFS missing.

I do recall telling those folks who want to know about Developer concerns to sign up for a paid ADC account.

Case in point.
 
Woohoo... maybe I will get leopard... eventually or if someone gets me it for christmas. lol
 
This is great news! Clearly Apple is laying the groundwork for ZFS in Leopard and I couldn't be happier!
 
spotlight07 said:
So the Sun guy was telling the truth after all.
Click to expand...

That must have been the most boring keynote I've ever watched...about something so interesting...

Amazing that SJ can excite me with iPod socks when they won't even fit my 3G iPod :)
 
I'll be more excited about ZFS when it is been tried
and tested for awhile under Solaris. Make sure it is rock
solid in the enterprise market first. I'd also be interested if and when any of the Linux distributions pick this up?

I've been wanting to put together a NAS Raid5 setup. Now
I want a NAS RaidZ setup! Maybe in a year or two...
 
boxlight said:
Average iMac user here. What does ZFS do that I might notice -- will ZFS matter to me? Serious question.
Click to expand...

I'm relatively new to the Mac OS X space and I seriously doubt that there will be any direct whiz-bang features that the average user will take advantage of, but ZFS is a seriously good thing if it lives up to its initial first impressions.

ZFS has a number of quite advanced features that would (if actually implemented in a timely fashion) take Mac OS X from having one of the most primitive filesystems in the Unix space to the most advanced (other than Solaris obviously). e.g.:

- self healing filesystems
- snapshotting, cloning
- dynamic striping across devices (i.e. the ability to add additional disks to a pool and have them integrated automagically)
- a number of features to improve performance over traditional filesystems and which could vastly improve performance over HFS+
- 128 bit filesystem so most of the common capacity limitations will not be encountered in the near future (size, pools, numbers of files, etc.)

There are others, but most of the Unix world is fairly excited about ZFS and in fact the whiff of the rumor that ZFS would be supported in some indeterminate future version of OS X was one of the reasons that finally decided to switch to a Mac. In short I don't think the "average" user will really notice that much difference but it gives Mac OS a modern filesystem and addresses a number of future problems while opening a lot of doors to future features and functionality.

There are a few neat demos here:

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/demos/

Honestly I sort of doubt that ZFS will be available as a bootable filesystem in 10.5, given that it isn't even 100% integrated into Solaris yet, but I would love to be surprised.
 
psychofreak said:
To create bootable ZFS systems one needs to use scripts or do it manually. The ZFS Boot project recently successfully added boot support to the OpenSolaris project, and is available in recent builds of Solaris Nevada. ZFS boot is currently planned for a Solaris 10 update in late 2007.

Thanks to this from Wikipedia (Solaris 10 is out now so its a bit old) it seems to me that bootable ZFS is in its very early stages...not good enough for Leopard...
Click to expand...

I was under the impression that ZFS under Solaris was not bootable because it was usually on a computer with BIOS instead of EFI (a larger firmware storage). Since Apple uses EFI, it might be possible to do things not normally possible with the old BIOS firmware.

And while we're at it, and like someone mentioned in this very thread, Schwartz himself said ZFS would be the default filesystem on Mac OS X 10.5. You can't have a default filesystem if the filesystem can't boot. There had to be some truth to what he said...he distinctly said 'default' did he not?
 
boxlight said:
Average iMac user here. What does ZFS do that I might notice -- will ZFS matter to me? Serious question.
Click to expand...

If you only have one physical disk drive, I think the only features you will notice are:

1) A time machine like ability to retrieve older versions of saved files. (Time Machine
does this by copying data to a second drive, ZFS does it by not over writing the
data on the first drive.)
2) almost zero chance of file corruption due to an end to end checksum scheme
3) ability to make a backup of a running drive that is a clean
"snapshot in time". Changes being made while a backup is in progress is a problem that ZFS solves
4) can make a RAID like system using multiple drives that you can reconfigure live buy adding more drives

If Apple does some work and does a good job of integrating ZFS withf inder and the desktop then users will be able to just plug in a disk drive and have more storage and not have to ever see a drive icon or know what drive their data is on. Also as you add drives not only should storage spce scale but ALL of your files will read and right faster. I doubt Apple will make it work this way, not at first but maybe by 10.6?
 
Can we expect a migration from HFS+ to ZFS if/when the filesystem is write-able and stable, or is that technically improbable?
 
ChrisA said:
If you only have one physical disk drive, I think the only features you will notice are:

1) A time machine like ability to retrieve older versions of saved files.
2) almost zero chance of file corruption due to an end to end checksum scheme
3) ability to make a backup of a running drive that is a clean
"snapshot in time". Changes being made while a backup is inprogress is a problem the ZFS solves
4) can make a RAID like system using multiple drives that you can reconfigure live buy adding more drives

If Apple does some work and does a good job of integrating ZFS withfinder and the desktop then users will beable to just plug in a disk drive and have more storage and not have to ever see a drive icon or know what drive their data is on. Also as you add drives not only should storage spce scale but ALL of your files will read and right faster. I doubt Apple will make it work this way, not at first but maybe by 10.6?
Click to expand...

I agree...the default should be a single pool that grows when you add new hard drives. And advanced options within Disk Utility should allow people to create new pools to act as a partition. Of course, only Mac OS X 10.5 (or 10.6) and later would be able to use ZFS so perhaps some users would prefer having at least one drive with HFS+ for earlier versions of OS X or FAT32 or NTFS.
 
Peace said:
The obvious question people should be asking is what is the purpose of ZFS "read-only" in Leopard ?
eh?

think about it.
Click to expand...

This has been bothering me for a while -- there's got to be a reason for it, but it's tough to consider what scenarios exist that would make it terribly useful. Sounds like you know, and we may just have to wait and be surprised. ;)
 
Brendon Bauer said:
Does ZFS increase the speed of your computer as well?
Click to expand...

From what little I can read from the nerd notes.... yes, but only in certain areas such as Virtual Memory, and backups which may make the overall system run faster or not.

Cromulent said:
ZFS is going to be a great addition to Mac OS X Server 10.5.
Click to expand...

Hell yes. I hope that Apple actually did what I am thinking and put ZFS in ProRez 422, their HD compression Codec, and the AJA IO HD. Those were breakthrough techs in the broadcasting industry and if ZFS or some form of it were used in Mac OS 10.5, 10.5 Server, and the late (pushed backed release date like Leopard) then Apple would have utilized ZFS much more than we expect.

p.s. I am not a DNA so no flames, I am trying my best to decipher all the nerd speak that is on the web about ZFS.
 
rented mule said:
You can't have a default filesystem if the filesystem can't boot. There had to be some truth to what he said...he distinctly said 'default' did he not?
Click to expand...

You can boot from a small /boot HFS partition, mount ZFS and then "chroot" into the the ZFS system. Maybe the new Apple computers will have this small /boot partition in flash memory? This would give the Macbook an "instant boot" ability. I can think of other scenarios too where the default file system is not the one you booted from
 
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