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ZFS is on Leopard... Sorta.
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Lame
This probably means that Apple just haven't got it all ported and working yet...
Which is quite funny in contrast of the fanatics who actually belived Apple helped Sun with it and that Apple was the first ones to get it to boot and yada yada...
To bad Apple, you clearly fail. I'm not intrested in your gadgets.
This probably means that Apple just haven't got it all ported and working yet...
Which is quite funny in contrast of the fanatics who actually belived Apple helped Sun with it and that Apple was the first ones to get it to boot and yada yada...
To bad Apple, you clearly fail. I'm not intrested in your gadgets.
Then why are you here on this forum at all? Just to make silly carping comments like the one above?
Apple never promised that Leopard would be a full bootable ZFS implementation, yet some people here seem to think that is the case. If Steve Jobs had announced that (like the infamous "3Ghz within a year" PPC gaffe), then maybe some of you would have reason for complaint.
BTW, it's "Too bad..., not "To bad..."
(not to mention "...intrested...")
OH, I did mention it...to bad!
I'm not exactly sure why but I get the feeling it is going to be as follows when Leopard is out of beta:
* No ZFS as default FS
* Optional ZFS for non-boot and non-system 'partitions', no gui, just command line
* A big warning sign when activating ZFS that Apple's implementation is still experimental and not to be used for mission critical or important data
* No ZFS as default FS
* Optional ZFS for non-boot and non-system 'partitions', no gui, just command line
* A big warning sign when activating ZFS that Apple's implementation is still experimental and not to be used for mission critical or important data
As long as Time Machine still works, I'm not too bothered.
Imagine the massive ***** that would fall from a very great height upon Apple if there was one tiny tiny little bug in Time Machine that caused a very few mothers and grandmothers to lose their data.
Better safe than sorry with backups and their filesystems.
Imagine the massive ***** that would fall from a very great height upon Apple if there was one tiny tiny little bug in Time Machine that caused a very few mothers and grandmothers to lose their data.
Better safe than sorry with backups and their filesystems.
I'm no developer, but from what I could gather from the wwdc 06 session videos on ADC, file snapshots on TimeMachine didn't seem so inefficient.
Check out the videos on ADC. It seems smart and well thought out, even if it is on the file-level. As I understood the ADC video sessions, Time Machine only updated the markers for the files that were changed, not the entire file itself. And only wrote the difference in bytes, into the FS-Snapshots, thus eliminating the need for huge backups of ie. iMovie-projects.
Check out the videos on ADC. It seems smart and well thought out, even if it is on the file-level. As I understood the ADC video sessions, Time Machine only updated the markers for the files that were changed, not the entire file itself. And only wrote the difference in bytes, into the FS-Snapshots, thus eliminating the need for huge backups of ie. iMovie-projects.
This assumes two things:
1: That Apple doesn't already have Solaris systems on-site, and that it would be a difficult process to get more if none are available.
2: That Solaris/Intel will just install on Mac hardware. Although Macs use many commodity parts, a Mac Pro is not a PC. Have you been able to install Windows without the BootCamp driver suite?
Snapshots have been implemented in the past. They're hardly new to ZFS.
My employer uses a lot of Network Appliance servers. NetApp has had copy-on-write disk-block semantics and snapshots for as long as I've used these devices (9 years now) and probably longer than that.
ZFS may be the first file system for a general-purpose OS to support this feature, but it's not the first implementation.
Well it will install. But you will have to have the joy of finding all the right drivers. BootCamp just saves you the hassle.
How to enable read/write ZFS on Leopard beta
From http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=32429&tstart=0&start=30
I know it's a pain, but you have to spend money to download Apple's betas, that is, pay their developer fee. If, however, this might inspire you to do this, you should know that zfs will run (read and write) on the latest build of Leopard, as Apple has (somewhat cryptically) said. Apple also has a "non-disclosure" clause on their developer memberships, but they appear to have already made a number of public statements about zfs in Leopard. So, here's a generic (and clumsy) way to enable kernel extensions on a BSD system, of which Leopard is a variant (actually, it runs over a version of Darwin). And zfs is a kernel extension, and can be loaded like any other. The zpool and zfs commands below you already know if you follow this thread.
Try this in terminal:
% cd /System/Library/Extensions
% ls -alF | less # This will show you all the kernel extensions, *.kext, in a pager
[hit the space bar to page forward; on the last page you should see:
...
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 ... ntfs.kext/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 ... smbfs.kext/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 ... udf.kext/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 ... webdav_fs.kext/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 ... zfs.kext/
(END)
# hit "q"; this gets you back to the terminal
...
If you see zfs.kext, then the installer did indeed put it on your system. Then:
% sudo kextload zfs.kext
password: # enter your admin password; if that doesn't work, become root with su
You will get some error messages about the cache, probably from the files Extensions.kextcache and Extensions.mkext. But, zfs will load (at least it will on a G5 dual 2.7).
zfs, zpool, now work, and man zfs, man zpool will give you a man page.
As far as I can tell, this is the process to load a kernel extension on any BSD system, of which Mac OS X/Darwin is one (the others are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD).
HOWEVER, be aware that finder in almost any version of OSX tries to automount every possible file system. Leopard does this as well; unlike zfs and zpool under Solaris, Leopard automounts any pool created or imported with zpool, and sets the mountpoint under /Volumes, WITHOUT running zfs create, or set mountpoint:
% zpool create zpool01 disk1
Automatically mounts in the finder and has the directory:
/Volumes/zpool01
Again, this happens WITHOUT RUNNING zfs, which is quite different from Solaris.
You will have to fiddle with permissions, and you might have to do something like:
sudo chmod -R /Volumes/zpool01 a+rwx
to make the entire pool writable (or some variant, g+rwx, etc.). But it will work.
I haven't tried using zfs quota, set mountpoint=, set share=, but set compression=on seems to work, but I don't see much compression going on.
On reboot (or after a crash, which is frequent on beta builds) the finder will, initially, not have the zfs kernel extension enabled, and will ask if you want to format the disk (or slice, or however you set it up). Click "ignore"; DO NOT FORMAT THE DISK. zfs already has, but the finder doesn't know it yet.
Repeat the kernel extension commands above. Then run:
zpool import -f poolname
You can also try zpool scrub, but I'm not sure if that helps.
You should have all the files you copied on the zfs system before the crash (but no promises; mine were, but maybe yours will not).
You can try "safe boot" with Leopard (hold down the shift key on boot), and that might disable some problematic kernel extensions.
If someone knows how to modify Extensions.kextcache and Extensions.mkext, please let me know. After the bugs are worked out, Leopard should be a pretty good platform.
Hope this helps.
G.W.
From http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=32429&tstart=0&start=30
I know it's a pain, but you have to spend money to download Apple's betas, that is, pay their developer fee. If, however, this might inspire you to do this, you should know that zfs will run (read and write) on the latest build of Leopard, as Apple has (somewhat cryptically) said. Apple also has a "non-disclosure" clause on their developer memberships, but they appear to have already made a number of public statements about zfs in Leopard. So, here's a generic (and clumsy) way to enable kernel extensions on a BSD system, of which Leopard is a variant (actually, it runs over a version of Darwin). And zfs is a kernel extension, and can be loaded like any other. The zpool and zfs commands below you already know if you follow this thread.
Try this in terminal:
% cd /System/Library/Extensions
% ls -alF | less # This will show you all the kernel extensions, *.kext, in a pager
[hit the space bar to page forward; on the last page you should see:
...
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 ... ntfs.kext/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 ... smbfs.kext/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 ... udf.kext/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 ... webdav_fs.kext/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 ... zfs.kext/
(END)
# hit "q"; this gets you back to the terminal
...
If you see zfs.kext, then the installer did indeed put it on your system. Then:
% sudo kextload zfs.kext
password: # enter your admin password; if that doesn't work, become root with su
You will get some error messages about the cache, probably from the files Extensions.kextcache and Extensions.mkext. But, zfs will load (at least it will on a G5 dual 2.7).
zfs, zpool, now work, and man zfs, man zpool will give you a man page.
As far as I can tell, this is the process to load a kernel extension on any BSD system, of which Mac OS X/Darwin is one (the others are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD).
HOWEVER, be aware that finder in almost any version of OSX tries to automount every possible file system. Leopard does this as well; unlike zfs and zpool under Solaris, Leopard automounts any pool created or imported with zpool, and sets the mountpoint under /Volumes, WITHOUT running zfs create, or set mountpoint:
% zpool create zpool01 disk1
Automatically mounts in the finder and has the directory:
/Volumes/zpool01
Again, this happens WITHOUT RUNNING zfs, which is quite different from Solaris.
You will have to fiddle with permissions, and you might have to do something like:
sudo chmod -R /Volumes/zpool01 a+rwx
to make the entire pool writable (or some variant, g+rwx, etc.). But it will work.
I haven't tried using zfs quota, set mountpoint=, set share=, but set compression=on seems to work, but I don't see much compression going on.
On reboot (or after a crash, which is frequent on beta builds) the finder will, initially, not have the zfs kernel extension enabled, and will ask if you want to format the disk (or slice, or however you set it up). Click "ignore"; DO NOT FORMAT THE DISK. zfs already has, but the finder doesn't know it yet.
Repeat the kernel extension commands above. Then run:
zpool import -f poolname
You can also try zpool scrub, but I'm not sure if that helps.
You should have all the files you copied on the zfs system before the crash (but no promises; mine were, but maybe yours will not).
You can try "safe boot" with Leopard (hold down the shift key on boot), and that might disable some problematic kernel extensions.
If someone knows how to modify Extensions.kextcache and Extensions.mkext, please let me know. After the bugs are worked out, Leopard should be a pretty good platform.
Hope this helps.
G.W.
Pedantic correction:
No. Leopard is not a BSD variant. Darwin, the base operating system for Leopard contains a BSD-derived userland. This means the basic command line tools, shell, some libraries, etc, are ported from BSD. (Actually, some of it, such as BASH, is GNU, but for the most part it's directly from BSD.)
However, this userland (together with the non-BSD userland such as Cocoa, Carbon, the windowing system, etc) is running over XNU, a kernel which isn't remotely BSD like. And virtually everything you described involves XNU and XNU-specific utilities, not the BSD userland.
Like I said, it's a pedantic correction, but if some developer thinks he's not breaking an NDA by pretending the above instructions apply equally to Darwin and FreeBSD, then he couldn't be more wrong. At the level we're talking about, the kernel and the tools to manage the kernel, none of the BSDs have anything in common with Darwin.
No. Leopard is not a BSD variant. Darwin, the base operating system for Leopard contains a BSD-derived userland. This means the basic command line tools, shell, some libraries, etc, are ported from BSD. (Actually, some of it, such as BASH, is GNU, but for the most part it's directly from BSD.)
However, this userland (together with the non-BSD userland such as Cocoa, Carbon, the windowing system, etc) is running over XNU, a kernel which isn't remotely BSD like. And virtually everything you described involves XNU and XNU-specific utilities, not the BSD userland.
Like I said, it's a pedantic correction, but if some developer thinks he's not breaking an NDA by pretending the above instructions apply equally to Darwin and FreeBSD, then he couldn't be more wrong. At the level we're talking about, the kernel and the tools to manage the kernel, none of the BSDs have anything in common with Darwin.
Well Mr I'm-from-the-country-where-we-don't-even-know-if-the-pacific-or-the-atlantic-is-on-the-west-or-east-side-of-the-****ing-piece-of-land-we-live-on, english isn't my native language and I don't care, it's still understandable.
Vote Bush!
Anyway, obviously they have tried to get ZFS there, why wouldn't they have wanted full support? And it's not there, clrly fail.
I'm here because I wanted to know if 1) Macbook Pro was fixed and a good buy 2) Leopard would offer something cool.
The answer for both things seems to be "not so much".
Hey loveturtle, just wanted to help you to be a little more clear on ZFS functionality in terms of it appears that with some script glue, ZFS would be the ideal solution for Time Machine. If you want the low down, the `send` and `recv` functions appear to be the key:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5461/6n7ht6qsc?a=view