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Apple Seeds ZFS Read/Write Developer Preview 1.1 for Leopard

Leopard

cohibadad said:
I don't know why some people are worried about installing 10.5.0. Leopard is beautiful to use and stable on PPC and Intel. Perhaps there are some specific applications they're unsure will work correctly? dunno but I have no troubles and use it daily. It has brought new life to my Dual G4 :) and is a dream on a core 2 duo. Frankly I continue to have more frustrations from Vista than I have had from any Leopard seed. I have used Leopard exclusively since WWDC and I'm still excited for official release as I've been waiting to buy some imacs and want Leopard pre-installed. All of this talk about waiting for 10.5.x before installing is nonsense IMHO.
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Agreed, with the exception of a few screen savers, most everything runs smoothly on 9A559. Overall, much snappier and responsive than Tiger is now.
 
Peace said:
I'm not gonna break my NDA but I will say it's fast as hell..
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Yeah because it's so hard to try ZFS for oneself ...

May be much faster than HFS+ in some cases I guess, I haven't mad my mac for more than 4 or 5 weeks and I definitly haven't tested the filesystem, also I wouldn't be able to compare it to my regular experience due to the 2.5" drive anyway.

boxlight said:
Average iMac user here. What does ZFS do that I might notice -- will ZFS matter to me? Serious question.
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Not much, you will notice if data on your drive gets corrupted and you can have timemachinelike feature with only one drive. ZFS makes more sense when you have lots of drives, and eventually need even more ones.

sblasl said:
OK, I'll bite.

Just what is it that we will see in OS 10.5 as it relates to ZFS? If this is what is stated, than what do we get?

"In the release notes, 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."
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Functionality for reading it? Rather useless if you haven't used Solaris with ZFS earlier and want to move over your data but probably easier to implement something which just tries to understand the data without changing and therefor eventually breaking it first. Just wait until you get it all.

Now if only Blizzard and Adobe could make sure their applications worked on case-sensetive volumes.

semireg said:
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.
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Pulled as in not mentioned as the top secret feature maybe.
Pulled as in "screw this now we won't have it" as some people speculated as some sort of weird revenge against Sun for a thing which is free and open? Not likely :D, and obviously not true either considering this news item.
 
I would think the main advantage for average users would be things they DON'T notice. The lack of disk thrashing, the lack of disk failure, the lack of lost data, and the lack of waiting are all things people will tend to NOT notice. They'll just experience a somewhat better computer.
 
Storage?

regarding the wikpedia description - does this actually virtually add storage? It says that it would take an incredible amount of time to run out of storage, so does that mean that with my 160gb imac and 250gb external drive that I won't have to add anymore storage???
 
Please, I beg of you Apple, make ZFS default bootable when Leopard releases! You have been working at this for too long to throw it away!
 
skiwhitman said:
regarding the wikpedia description - does this actually virtually add storage? It says that it would take an incredible amount of time to run out of storage, so does that mean that with my 160gb imac and 250gb external drive that I won't have to add anymore storage???
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It doesn't magically add storage you don't have... but what it means is that you could keep adding drives into a single large partition/volume and never run into a size limit.
 
kwong2006 said:
Please, I beg of you Apple, make ZFS default bootable when Leopard releases! You have been working at this for too long to throw it away!
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...they've already said it's not even going to be writable in 10.5.0. It doesn't surprise me at all, considering how important it is to be sure that filesystems are heavily tested.

skiwhitman said:
<something>
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Um... not even close. It takes an incredible amount of time before the number of files gets too high for the filesystem to count properly (essentially). You'll run out of storage millions of years before then.
 
skiwhitman said:
regarding the wikpedia description - does this actually virtually add storage? It says that it would take an incredible amount of time to run out of storage, so does that mean that with my 160gb imac and 250gb external drive that I won't have to add anymore storage???
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Yes, you know, a certain someone WAS right when he said "640k certainly are enough for computers", the problem some 25 years ago was that ZFS wasn't ready yet.

So we can all dig you our original IBM PCs and reformat our 10Meg MFM disks with ZFS and we'll never have to worry about storage anymore...

:eek:
 
Brendon Bauer said:
Does ZFS increase the speed of your computer as well?
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We could say that. In fact, it will not speed up your computer BUT it will prevent it to be slower because of disc access.

With this file systems, heavy write on the disks will not make the OS hang anymore even if the cache of the hard drive is full.

The only big thing that is missing today in ZFS is that you cannot remove a disk from a zpool
 
What if the ZFS is one of the big "secrets" of upcoming Leopard? Could it be possible to see ZFS in the Leopard when it´ll be released?


P.S. My first post, don´t judge the n00b :)
 
viltsu said:
What if the ZFS is one of the big "secrets" of upcoming Leopard? Could it be possible to see ZFS in the Leopard when it´ll be released?
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Not while they just released a beta of a read-only ZFS with a warning that this won't happen only a short time before Leopard goes GM...
 
For a future version of OSX, and a future version of a Mac File System I expect the hanging problem to be solved. There is nothing worse than knowing that you have such a fast system with so much potential and power behind it being run by such a sophisticated OS and then you run a program that makes heavy use of the disc and everything just freezes and becomes unresponsive for minutes at a time.

A multi tasking OS should never, ever, ever freeze. Ever! So why is it that OSX does it so often, and so badly when disk read/write operations are involved.
 
Leopard server

this would mostly benefit the server release. also ZFS is fast as hell. like OMG fast. it will most definently not become the defautl botable file system in 10.5 but 10.6 its very likely. if apple wants to stay in the server business they need this. apple after all if primarily a hardware comany. imagine dual booting solaris and OSX on an Xserver. mmmmmm
 
Hi guys,

From what I've read it seems that one advantage would be that if say you built a 200GB Mirrored RAID set & wished to add more disk space to it you could (as long as you have the space to house the drive) just resize the pool to include the drive instead of rebuilding the RAID.

Is that right?
 
Resource forks. What happens to them with ZFS? Is it possible to remove support for resource forks from the Mac OS without breaking everything?
 
bentoms said:
Hi guys,

From what I've read it seems that one advantage would be that if say you built a 200GB Mirrored RAID set & wished to add more disk space to it you could (as long as you have the space to house the drive) just resize the pool to include the drive instead of rebuilding the RAID.

Is that right?
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No. You can't add an additional drive to an existing ZFS filesystem. You can additional ZFS filesystems to the pool however. Say you have an existing pool mypool that currently contains a mirror of D1 and D2. You can add D3 and D4 as and ADDITIONAL mirror to that pool. So now mypool contains D1/D2 and D3/D4. As far as storage is concerned, you will see it as one filesystem.

I deal with ZFS on a daily basis in both the office and in personal use on large arrays of drives. Honestly, the only people that are going to be interested in this are the MacOS server people and possibly those running external drive array configurations. The fact that they are JUST implementing ZFS read ONLY, leads me to believe Time Machine has nothing to do with it, as it's definitely going to need to read and write to it.

While I'm not going to get into it, as you can go and read the docs from opensolaris. ZFS is concerned with data integrity and not speed, and it shows.
 
bentoms said:
Hi guys,

From what I've read it seems that one advantage would be that if say you built a 200GB Mirrored RAID set & wished to add more disk space to it you could (as long as you have the space to house the drive) just resize the pool to include the drive instead of rebuilding the RAID.

Is that right?
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No. You can't add an additional drive to an existing mirrored ZFS filesystem. You can additional ZFS filesystems to the pool however. You can add an additional drive to a mirror,but it will just become a 3way mirror. RAIDZ will not work that way though. Say you have an existing pool mypool that currently contains a mirror of D1 and D2. You can add D3 and D4 as and ADDITIONAL mirror to that pool. So now mypool contains D1/D2 and D3/D4. Or with RAIDZ you have D1/D2/D3, you can add D4/D5/D6 to the pool. As far as storage is concerned, you will see it as one filesystem.

I deal with ZFS on a daily basis in both the office and in personal use on large arrays of drives. Honestly, the only people that are going to be interested in this are the MacOS server people and possibly those running external drive array configurations. The fact that they are JUST implementing ZFS read ONLY, leads me to believe Time Machine has nothing to do with it, as it's definitely going to need to read and write to it.

While I'm not going to get into it, as you can go and read the docs from opensolaris. ZFS is concerned with data integrity and not speed, and it shows.

EDIT: Of course you could *probably* add additional storage to a non-redudant striped array (RAID0), like you can in standard Solaris filesystems. But I've never done it as it's pointless in any production environment to run without redundancy.
 
So folks, is people willing to take stabs why apple has implemented ZFS read only?

Is there any wild guesses what they have in mind? Might it be mainly for server side use where they would test some stuff, or do they have some kind of masterplan evolving?

Now,hit it.
 
phytonix said:
ZFS vs WinFS who will win?
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Microsoft will implement ZFS into Windows Vienna, followed by a Linux kernel in Vienna's successor :p

(Actually, I might consider switching back to Windows if they could get a *nix like stability and memory management, with all of the Windows API's)
Macinposh said:
So folks, is people willing to take stabs why apple has implemented ZFS read only?

Is there any wild guesses what they have in mind? Might it be mainly for server side use where they would test some stuff, or do they have some kind of masterplan evolving?

Now,hit it.
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Implementing a file system is hard work. With a normal program, if it errors, it attempts to recover from the error, and if it can't, it crashes. With a file system, if it errors, it corrupts data. If it doesn't crash, it continues to corrupt data, and you lose a lot of files. If you don't have a good backup, you could lose years of work in the blink of an eye because ZFS was rushed.

Give it time, I'm sure Apple will add it in when they feel it's 100% ready for home usage.
 
kcmac said:
Cromulent. Why the hate on the Rocketman? Speaking only for myself, I have found Rocketman to offer good information around here for quite awhile.
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It is not hate. It is a dislike for stating conjecture as fact.

kcmac said:
It seems where ZFS will affect the average user, like myself will be in the easy addition of extra hard drive space when we start to build up our war chests of videos and other media. Seems like it will eliminate a lot of decision making. We suddenly don't have to think if we should get the 320 gig, or the 160 or the 500. Running out of space...easily add to the pool and without 20 gazillion icons of hard drives on our desktops.

That is correct, right?
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Pretty much. Although obviously you will still need to take into account total pool size so hard drive capacity will still be a decision that needs to be made. Plus you may want more than one pool and I would assume that each pool would be represented by a hard drive icon as it is now.
 
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