Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

ZFS in Latest Leopard Builds

MacRumors

MacRumors

macrumors bot
Original poster
Apr 12, 2001
68,187
38,974


Several sites are reporting on ZFS support that is now built into the latest build of Mac OS X (Leopard) which was seeded last week.

The ZFS team at Sun was contacted by Apple in April about porting ZFS to Mac OS X. Arstechnica previously discussed advantages of ZFS as a file system. These include

- Efficient storage and handling of very small files.
- Logical volume management through a pooled storage model.
- Improved data integrity using checksums on all data.
- Snapshots

Mac4Ever first posted a screenshot of the ZFS formatting option now in Leopard:

zfsleopard.png


More information on ZFS is available at the ZFS homepage and Wikipedia.
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2006/12/18/zfs-in-latest-leopard-builds/
Could this mean revolutionary things ahead for the next OS? Perhaps better integration with new hardware?
 
So will ZFS just be supported by Leopard, or will the entire file system be based off this?

I remember reading that article on Arstechnica and the idea of Time Machine with ZFS sounded pretty interesting.
 
ZFS makes me a little bit horny. Just a bit. First filesystem to do that since BFS, actually.

OH NO I'M CHEATING ON MY FIRST FILESYSTEM LOVE! :eek:
 
Paranoidmarvin said:
Bring on ZFS, it makes sense with Time machine
Click to expand...

If they actually use its built-in diff/snapshot ability for Time Machine instead of the ugly hack onto HFS+ we saw as of the original dev preview, I might have to go offer my body up to any of Apple's filesystem developers.
 
For us poor plebeians, what the hell does the adoption of ZFS bring anyway? Is it just another geeky filesystem, or something that might really make a difference for ordinary users?

At least HFS enabled much bigger storage and more sensible partitioning back then...could any of you clarify this issue for the non-file server admins out there? Thanks.
 
Awesome. The idea of being able to use ZFS in OSX was quite exciting to me when I first read the rumors before. Especially the "pooled storage" method. I assume this would be the end of one's home folder being full because the drive it resides on is full, since an additional drive added to the machine would just add to the shared pool for storage. The home folder would no longer be limited to a single device. That and the redundancy and backup features.

Ars Technica has suggested that this would be required for Time Machine to function, but isn't Time Machine already included in the developer's previews?
 
BRLawyer said:
For us poor plebeians, what the hell does the adoption ZFS bring anyway? Is it just another geeky filesystem, or something that might really make a difference for ordinary users?

At least HFS enabled much bigger storage and more sensible partitioning back then...could any of you clarify this issue for the non-file server admins out there? Thanks.
Click to expand...


The Zettabyte file system is 128-bit for one.
 
ZFS isn't currently bootable; but I'm not sure that matters since OS X uses a separate boot partition.

The big draw with ZFS, AFAIK, is it has the ability to manage differential file snapshots. So Time Machine would be a heck of a lot faster than if it's managed by an application within the OS.

I would bet that, with Leopard, it'll be an option but not the default. Analogous to the way case-sensitive HFS+ is currently handled. I'd be tempted to try it if it's available.

I wonder how it will handle resource forks though? I don't know if ZFS has that sort of thing available.
 
BRLawyer said:
For us poor plebeians, what the hell does the adoption of ZFS bring anyway? Is it just another geeky filesystem, or something that might really make a difference for ordinary users?

At least HFS enabled much bigger storage and more sensible partitioning back then...could any of you clarify this issue for the non-file server admins out there? Thanks.
Click to expand...


There are at least 3 links helpfully given in the article at the begining of the thread to clear, useful, not over-technical discussion and description of zfs. You should read them.
 
ZFS vs WinFS (SQL-database-filesystem)?

I don't really know what I'm talking about as I'm no filesystem guru by any means, but I do remember rumors in the past of Windows and/or OS X going to some kind of sql-database-driven-super-efficient-fast-revolutionary-metadata filesystem. My question is how does ZFS compare to that??? How does it compare to the [vaporware] WinFS???
 
Let's run through a simple example.

You have 1 hard drive right? You are running out of space. You go buy another drive. You want to add it to the system but now you have to decide whether you want that drive to just handle storage of files, and if so which files? Well, how about this instead? You can add the drive as a pool. It then "magically" appears as if your original drive is now x gigabytes larger than it is since it is using two drives as a pool. Convenient no?

Or how about you want to backup that drive instead? Ok, add a drive to the system. Add it to the pool, tell it to mirror the drive instead. It now copies the data from one drive to the other and any changes mirror the other. If a corrupt file is on drive 1 (your original working copy) it checks the other to see if the backup is non-corrupt. If so, it opens that file, and copies the good data to the original drive as good data. It does this with Checksums of the files.

Another for the geekiness factor is RAIDZ. One drive or two can be a parity drive. Ever use PAR files? Yup very similar. You have files or a whole drive disappear? You can pretty much restore it from the parity drive if enough of the data still exists, etc.

Or how about you like having "versions" of your filesystem. You're about to update OS X to 10.5.2 and you're afraid it might break your system. So you create a ZFS snapshot. It now olds this "snapshot" of your filesystem and the files in it. You install the new update, it does indeed bork your computer. So you tell OS X and ZFS to use a previous snapshot, boom. You're back to 10.5.1 and it works.

Also the idea of using ZFS with time machine, is really really cool. Also, on the fly compression of your files. With no real performance hit. Another neat one is built in encryption. So you'll be able to have file vault at the filesystem level rather than the OS X application/OS level.
 
Think about these things:

1) Shutting down your Mac Pro, opening it up and adding another hard drive. When you boot back into OS X, it tells you that you have added another hard drive and asks whether or not you'd like to add it to your "Macintosh HD" or whatever you call it. When you say yes, it automatically adds the space to your available space, and also automagically spreads your data out in the most efficient ways.

2) One of your hard drives on your Mac begins to corrupt data. Your filesystem automatically detects this, AND heals it by recreating the data on one of the other HD's in your ZFS pool.

3) Each user on your system literally has their own entire filesystem devoted to their data. No reasons to use quotas, as the actual filesystem is only a certain size that you set.

4) Each of the very small text files on your system, of which there are thousands, take up the size that they are instead of the fs block size. Lots of unused and previously unusable space saved.

5) Having multiple "snapshots" of your data, in the paradigm of Time Machine. Except get this...each snapshot is a snapshot of how the blocks look, not your files. So the size of each snapshot is only however much space it takes to record what blocks have changed.
 
m-dogg said:
So will ZFS just be supported by Leopard, or will the entire file system be based off this?
Click to expand...

ZFS is a file system (a very capable modern one) so the later part of your question doesn't make sense. If you mean "will Apple make ZFS the default file system for Mac OS X?" then I would say "not likely any time soon (but I would be happy to be wrong)".
 
This sounds very interesting, always good to be able to use the latest new tech.

From the Wikipedia article: "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."

I wonder how long until we hit that limit :p
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back