So, porting all of the software that deals with the XNU kernel is easier than writing a file system? OS X is not just Cocoa, there are some serious low-level parts.
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Apple Shuts Down Open Source ZFS Project
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So, porting all of the software that deals with the XNU kernel is easier than writing a file system? OS X is not just Cocoa, there are some serious low-level parts.
I wonder if it can be done by simulation? Is it hard to model a virtual hard drive?
Jeff Bonwick Confirms That Apple Abandoned ZFS Over Licensing Issues.
Bonwick is the lead developer of ZFS at Sun.
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-October/033125.html
Bonwick is the lead developer of ZFS at Sun.
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-October/033125.html
So many filesystems, no arrival point
The sheer number of EXISTING file systems is emmense:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems
The number of file systems Apple has developed and supports is almost as emmense.
Can anybody agree any of the existing systems are good enough or do we really need one more, which due to the nature of conflicting goals of stakeholders will almost certainly result in 3 versions of each branch of generalized system.
Someone decided to standardize on USB, wifi a,b,g,n, EDGE, Ethernet and such. A certain portion of that was by sheer widespread adoption, the case of the trend is your friend, such as FAT16 and FAT32. In other cases a top level choice was made, such as Firewire.
What is needed is a standard that is adopted and used by as many stakeholders as possible for as long as possible so our experience more approximates Ethernet than Nu-bus.
Rocketman
The sheer number of EXISTING file systems is emmense:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems
The number of file systems Apple has developed and supports is almost as emmense.
Can anybody agree any of the existing systems are good enough or do we really need one more, which due to the nature of conflicting goals of stakeholders will almost certainly result in 3 versions of each branch of generalized system.
Someone decided to standardize on USB, wifi a,b,g,n, EDGE, Ethernet and such. A certain portion of that was by sheer widespread adoption, the case of the trend is your friend, such as FAT16 and FAT32. In other cases a top level choice was made, such as Firewire.
What is needed is a standard that is adopted and used by as many stakeholders as possible for as long as possible so our experience more approximates Ethernet than Nu-bus.
Rocketman
Well in terms of connectivity we're moving toward LightPeak (allegedly) and USB 3 (definitely.)
Perhaps there are similar avenues for standardizing filesystems, although OS X's own filesystem might be as much a product of differentiation as it is utilitarian.
Good grief. A "cutting off your nose to spite your face" bag of hurt.
Would it have taken a couple of pennies out of their quarterly profit ? It's like a bunch of greedy, petulant children have taken over the executive suite in Cupertino.
Boot Camp 3.0 (apparently) contains Windows drivers for HFS+. I've been copying files from my OS X partition into Windows 7 for weeks now.
Haha... of course (the filesystem(s), not the pool)! Apple were a long way along on this. I create 4 x 128mb "disks" and a zpool (called zfsraidz) of the 4 in raidz (raid-5 like redundancy).
Then, i created a zfs filesystem zfsraidz/rob mounted to /Volumes/rob and hey presto! I can drag-drop and the finder even knows its a ZFS file system (plus correct size).
Its brilliant! I want to try it out with a USB hub of external hard drives of the same size.
Attachments
Please, don't discuss what you don't know. Adobe screwed themselves when they wanted $10/unit of sale for Display Postscript and so Display PDF was the replacement.
Sun's Zfs isn't in the clear with patent issues.
Pennies is not even remotely what Sun would charge.
Backdraft is flat out wrong regarding Porting Cocoa, Quartz, Display PDF and the rest to FreeBSD.
Quartz alone is roughly 10 million lines of code.
So tell me, for the average user - the Average Joe, what real, simple, non-learning-curve advantages would I have gotten with ZFS that represent something significantly better than the current system?
I understand RAID features are one example (I hope not the only one), but frankly the average user is hardly going to touch that (part of the reason the RAID bug in SL went virtually unnoticed.) Plus, the ability to disconnect exernal drives at will (if we're talking about a large, multi-drive setup - fairly unlikely for the average user anyway) is still pretty important.
I understand RAID features are one example (I hope not the only one), but frankly the average user is hardly going to touch that (part of the reason the RAID bug in SL went virtually unnoticed.) Plus, the ability to disconnect exernal drives at will (if we're talking about a large, multi-drive setup - fairly unlikely for the average user anyway) is still pretty important.
Well, I'm sorry, I didn't intend to make anyone sad. It sounds like what you really mean is that ZFS does offer big advantages for average users and anyone who doesn't agree with you just doesn't "get it". But that's not the case.
Responses in order:
- You can already do this trivially with a second disk or partition. Average users can do it through System Preferences. ZFS might make it more elegant and efficient, but it doesn't add a feature that we're currently missing.
- You misunderstood my point, or I didn't make it clear. You're never going to see an iMac, much less a MacBook/MacBook Pro, with mixed internal SSD and HDD storage. And pooling with a detachable, external drive sounds dubious at best. My point is that SSD will replace HDD rather than complement it in consumer machines. As you say, nobody wants to go back to HDD after using SSD. The migration will be rapid as soon as prices come down.
Slight caveat: Mac Pros will probably be available with SSD/HDD combinations as a BTO option, but then you could just use the SSD as your boot disk and get a much bigger speed boost than you would by using it only for caching. So again, I don't see any obvious win for the average or even pro user. - hmmm... "Often I don't notice?" My question was how often is this happening. Are you saying that I currently experience data corruption "often" that would be prevented by a checksumming file system, but I just don't notice it for some reason? I'd like to see some research on that because, as you say, I haven't noticed it and I do tend to use the data on my hard drive quite a bit.
By far the most common cause of data loss among users (i.e. not data centers) is physical hard drive failure. Checksumming won't help you with that -- you'll need a backup or an appropriate form of RAID. You say "why take the risk and lose a x TB filesystem?". You need to quantify a risk before you can judge the effectiveness and justify the costs of a mitigation.
On a server or a workstation with a bunch of drives, you're probably right. I would have killed for something like ZFS when I managed a little server farm a few years ago. But on my iMac with a single internal drive and a single external backup drive? Checksumming would give me more peace of mind but otherwise, no, I wouldn't notice a difference because I wouldn't actually use any of the features you're talking about on this machine, just like most Mac users.
It seems perfectly reasonable to call ZFS a "next generation" FS, but what do you mean that others are "at least a generation behind"? I'm not aware of any well-defined or widely agreed upon concept of FS "generations." And where did the "missing" generation go? Yeah, HFS+ is old and in need of a replacement. But I still don't see how it's limitations are causing *actual problems* today.
Well that is indisputably cool. But as someone who manages ZFS volumes on the fly from the command line, by definition you're in a pretty small minority among all PC users, Mac or otherwise.
Oh, only for this year? Well, yeah, if you're currently using ZFS in OpenSolaris and digging it, I can totally see that as a *personal opinion*. But how many Mac users fall into that category? How many have been waiting with baited breath to pool their SSD with their HDD? Not many. I stand by my point.
So..?
Thats pretty pointless, its like the ability to disconnect one section of my brain.
You are the designated site pro-Windows/MS naysayer. Fine. No complaint. So what do you use/like about Mac? I presume it is not 100 instances of MacDraw on the server or 500 4 core iMacs stacked in 42U cabinets horizontally, incidentally acting as a nightlight for the room.
Rocketman
I know its not really that much for an operating system as a whole but 10 Million just for Quartz!?
Yeah, it couldn't possibly be a sound business decision on Apple's part, protecting their platform from reliance on a technology with an uncertain future or unacceptable costs.
Care to share the source of your insider information about the "couple of pennies per quarter" cost? Oh, you don't have a source. You just made that up. What a surprise.
You are the designated site pro-Windows/MS naysayer. Fine. No complaint. So what do you use/like about Mac? I presume it is not 100 instances of MacDraw on the server or 500 4 core iMacs stacked in 42U cabinets horizontally, incidentally acting as a nightlight for the room.
Rocketman
Nightlight... What!?
Aiden from memory hasn't actually said anything good about Apple in a long time.
I know its not really that much for an operating system as a whole but 10 Million just for Quartz!?
Well, to be fair Quartz has been developed continuously since pre-10.0, so for 10 years. Same with Cocoa and all the other codebases. It's not like a team of three dudes and a huge room of Bawls hammered it out in six months ;p
That sounds impressive when you skip over all the details. In fact, WHS doesn't provide any special support for hot-swapping. To remove a drive, you go to the WHS console, tell it which drive to remove, wait for it to copy the data to another drive and then you can physically remove the drive. If it's a USB or FireWire drive OR if you have *hardware* that supports hot plugging SATA (e.g. the HP MediaSmart Server mentioned by Microsoft), you don't need to turn the machine off. Adding a drive is similar in that you have to coordinate it via the WHS console. So, WHS itself is no more or less "hot-swappable" than any other OS.
Are the asterisks around "internal" meant to suggest that there's something special about internal drives? Because, really, there's not. All that matters is the physical connection, not the mounting location. If I have an internal FireWire drive in a Mac Pro, I can pull it out and plug in a new one without turning the machine off. No big deal, and it's not really hot swapping.
"Hot swap" is pretty well defined, at least in the server space. It means that you can walk up to a running machine, yank out a drive, "swap" it with a matching one and the volume will be rebuilt in the background with no downtime. WHS doesn't help you with that. Hot *plugging* is a better description of what you do with WHS, but of course nearly every OS supports hot pluggable drives.
Relevant docs from Microsoft:
Easily increase your data storage with WHS
Windows Home Server product guide (.docx download)
Windows Home Server technical brief
Yes. Every once in a while (couple of months or so), Quartz or QuartzWM decides to take a sh*t and I have to hold down the power button on the machine, because no keys work, even though I think the kernel is still alive. When I boot back up, I have something called "recovered files". Apparently there was a problem that journaling didn't full deal with.
Many people misunderstand ZFS. The data integrity thing/checksumming keeps getting mentioned, with the protest of there only being one drive in your typical desktop. Those people are misunderstanding. ZFS can correct some things even when there's only one drive. It's also about DETECTING. Wouldn't you like to know if your computer was silently corrupting your data because of a bad disk controller, power supply, or maybe a brownout? ZFS will many times be able to fix it, but will always be able to tell you. Is "The system detected and corrected an error on your hard disk. If these errors continue, you should take the computer to an authorized service center" too difficult for the average user to understand? In addition to all that, with SSDs, the possibility of having multiple drives I would say is much more likely. You don't have the platter, spindle, read/write head, which is what makes multiple hard disks too expensive for desktops. I think if SSDs come down enough, it is quite possible to see multiple drives in desktops and laptops. What you need is software to manage them, like ZFS.
It's also stupid to say ZFS is pointless because you can implement feature X without it by doing it another way (which is a lot of work). Sure, I could write a GUI app without something like AppKit/Cocoa, but why do it when those frameworks give me so much for free? It makes no sense to implement a file open box when I can just declare and instantiate an NSOpenPanel. It's a waste of engineering effort to do it the hard way.
The fact that Apple invested the talent and money to get the port nearly complete says a lot about their views on the value of a filesystem like ZFS.
Who knows why the negotiations failed. Maybe Uncle Steve wanted it for nearly free. We weren't party to them, so it's ridiculous to speculate on why it didn't happen.