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ZFS In Leopard

mkrishnan said:
Well, that's the key reason they use FAT32 now. (Well, *my* iPod is MacHFS+.... ;) ). That became the default standard for flash devices and so on because every OS supports it. My understanding is that MS owns patents on some aspects of FAT32 but doesn't charge users at this point? I'm not sure if that's correct, though.
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as far as i recall, you're right. of course another issue is that fat32 is not journaled, so that increases the life of the flash ram.
 
jhu said:
as far as i recall, you're right. of course another issue is that fat32 is not journaled, so that increases the life of the flash ram.
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When the rumors come true and someone has the guts to release a flash-based notebook, I wonder what will be done about this... particularly if it's Apple....Maybe Flash life is becoming good enough already that it's a non-issue, but....
 
Cappy said:
Amazing...you grab the first part of my post to quote without including the part where I go on to say that there would need to be a way for Windows to access it. Talk about taking things out of context. :rolleyes:
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Simple reason. There isn't one. Do you have any idea the instability that would be caused by intro. such a driver? I've used MacDisk for Windows and when things get "funky" it does bad things to the system. Simply won't do this so we are back to the beginning. It won't work in Windows and as such Apple will stick with FAT32. Its a perfectly fine file system. It would be like porting OS X to the iPod. Why?
 
i wonder if drive makers and others could form a consortium to figure out a replacement for FAT32 on all these portable drives and devices, similar to how Apple is joining forces with others to standardize Li-ion batteries. but then again, maybe it doesn't matter that much (no file systems are exploding) and would be more hassle than help.
 
SiliconAddict said:
Simple reason. There isn't one. Do you have any idea the instability that would be caused by intro. such a driver? I've used MacDisk for Windows and when things get "funky" it does bad things to the system. Simply won't do this so we are back to the beginning. It won't work in Windows and as such Apple will stick with FAT32. Its a perfectly fine file system. It would be like porting OS X to the iPod. Why?
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why not? linux already runs on the ipod.
 
jhu said:
why not? linux already runs on the ipod.
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Actually, that's a bad analogy. Linux on the iPod is a re-write of the entire operating system that allows you to run the hardware without the original OS. You can already put Solaris or (someday) OS X on PC hardware and get ZFS that way. But that's not the point. It would have to be ZFS within Windows.... and the programming of the filesystem compatibility layer would have to be very tight to not cause problems.... It's possible, certainly. But in the case of flash iPods, again, why bother?
 
Evangelion said:
More info about ZFS. I like the part about 128-bit filesystem....
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I like:

"ZFS appears to applications as a standard POSIX file system; no application changes are needed to store data in ZFS.

...

When reading, if the endianness doesn't match, the metadata is byte-swapped in memory. Files appear to applications, as is usual in POSIX systems, as simple arrays of bytes, so applications remain responsible for coping with any required byte-swapping within file data."

Rocketman
 
Rocketman said:
When reading, if the endianness doesn't match, the metadata is byte-swapped in memory. Files appear to applications, as is usual in POSIX systems, as simple arrays of bytes, so applications remain responsible for coping with any required byte-swapping within file data.
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This is very nice.

Reflecting back on the conversation about FAT32 and the fact that major some operating system *cough cough* won't have a proper file ownership / permission scheme any time in the near future... it's kind of sad, isn't it? POSIX isn't perfect. It isn't even remotely new. But come on.... :rolleyes: At least it works mostly.
 
No Magic Tricks

The demo of Time Machine was, to say the least, impressive. However, now that i have seen how it appears to work i am left a bit pi**ed of at the way it was presented to the world. I sincerely hope that Apple do have some amazing stuff still to be announced regarding Leopard as Time Machine is nothing to be amazed at when you see the requirements.
 
I think ZFS would be a something apple really should have. To be cutting edge then need something to replace HFS+ don't get me wrong HFS+ is great but it is getting old. Either that or they should make there own from the ground up. Not based on HFS+ but something new.
 
trainguy77 said:
I think ZFS would be a something apple really should have. To be cutting edge then need something to replace HFS+ don't get me wrong HFS+ is great but it is getting old. Either that or they should make there own from the ground up. Not based on HFS+ but something new.
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there're a whole host of filesystems they could go with that are better than hfs+: zfs, xfs, jfs, etc...
 
jhu said:
as far as i recall, you're right. of course another issue is that fat32 is not journaled, so that increases the life of the flash ram.
Click to expand...
Since the File Allocation Table is at a fixed address, FAT is not much better. In any case, the reliability of FAT will always be of much greater concern than any flash you put it on. ;)

Interestingly enough, ZFS is a great filesystem to put on flash. It has no fixed location metadata outside of the uberblocks, and the copy-on-write structure ensures that rewrites of blocks are done elsewhere.

(The uberblocks are of no concern, since there are 128 of them. They are written in turn, once every 5 seconds--so it will take more than 2 years online to reach 100000 writes.)
 
5939274829 said:
Since the File Allocation Table is at a fixed address, FAT is not much better. In any case, the reliability of FAT will always be of much greater concern than any flash you put it on. ;)

Interestingly enough, ZFS is a great filesystem to put on flash. It has no fixed location metadata outside of the uberblocks, and the copy-on-write structure ensures that rewrites of blocks are done elsewhere.

(The uberblocks are of no concern, since there are 128 of them. They are written in turn, once every 5 seconds--so it will take more than 2 years online to reach 100000 writes.)
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i don't think that really matters as much since flash ram is currently smart enough to remap blocks to unused portions of memory. so a file that is logically contiguous may really be scattered all over the place in the flash ram.
 
jhu said:
i don't think that really matters as much since flash ram is currently smart enough to remap blocks to unused portions of memory. so a file that is logically contiguous may really be scattered all over the place in the flash ram.
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I don't know much about the wear leveling software, but I have read that it is implemented in the controller, and not the flash itself; so it is used at the discretion of the manufacturer. Unfortunately, it is difficult to confirm such features for any given device, and furthermore, I don't think most flash uses ECC. (though I hope I am wrong...)

Perhaps that is the best feature of ZFS though: the ability to detect (and correct) corrupt data. This is something that is inevitable, and which only ZFS addresses at this time. (Wether it is worn out flash, or a buggy disk or controller. While there are many possible causes, those last two are unfortunately not rare with ATA hardware.)

Also, the on disk format is always consistent, which is great for removable devices.
 
...more stuff

..here are the Wikipedia links for UFS and related:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_File_System

The Sun guy "Eric" quoted in the original note claims "Sun would be ecstatic
to port ZFS to MacOSX". Highly charged...maybe.

IBM is still too close to Apple these days..and there "are 128 bit versions" of
AIX. Should Apple petition for "Open AIX"? They are still struggling to get
a working port of OpenSolaris to the ppc. Without a good "file app" no-one
on anyone's software engineering team would want to progress to higher
resource systems (i.e. 128 bit OS's, 256 bit...etc). Both Jobs and McNeally
would want the "full university press" of new ideas on their boxes...not just
the "latest and greatest" from overworked SE teams.

OpenZFS?

Anyone working for Sun reading these pages please post.

Hey didn't Moto have a version of Unix?

WW

<---still too hot in Texas
 
wincc said:
Just read this:

http://www.99mac.se/aktuella-rykten/109481-zfs-i-leopard.html#post781720

True / False ? :rolleyes:
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Just when you think the ZFS thing is not going to happen..... This looks good.

For all of those who really want to see ZFS first hand and have an Intel Mac. Here is a hint: Solaris runs on Mac Apple hardware. That said even on Solaris, ZFS is not something you would use for a small single volume filesystem like on a FW or USB drive and you don't boot from it either. This is something you put on your fiber channel disk array and use to manage a few terabytes (or zeta bytes)

I would really like to see Sun and Apple work together where they can. They are similar companies and each company has strengths where the other is weak
 
ChrisA said:
For all of those who really want to see ZFS first hand and have an Intel Mac. Here is a hint: Solaris runs on Mac Apple hardware.
Click to expand...

Not only that, but they even seem to have recently resurrected the long-dormant Solaris PowerPC port; it looks like there's a bleeding-edge port of OpenSolaris that runs on G4s and G5s.

The computing world sure got weird in the last year or two.
 
ChrisA said:
Just when you think the ZFS thing is not going to happen..... This looks good.

For all of those who really want to see ZFS first hand and have an Intel Mac. Here is a hint: Solaris runs on Mac Apple hardware. That said even on Solaris, ZFS is not something you would use for a small single volume filesystem like on a FW or USB drive and you don't boot from it either. This is something you put on your fiber channel disk array and use to manage a few terabytes (or zeta bytes)

I would really like to see Sun and Apple work together where they can. They are similar companies and each company has strengths where the other is weak
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dang, well i guess i wouldn't use ZFS then, but it's still cool that it will be available
 
I think apple will make ZFS work for the boot volume. I think they would also make it work for smaller files / HDs I think this format really would put apple ahead of windows.
 
stupid XSan

I'm thrilled I just got my XSan 1.4 software last Friday. I'll have it deployed by the end of next week (storage arriving Wednesday).
It should be significantly deployed by the time Apple makes ZFS the default filesystem for XSAN so they can tie in snapshots.
 
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