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

ZFS on Mac OS X

M

MShock

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 7, 2008
84
0
With Snow Leopard coming, ZFS will become a part of Mac OS X. I want to know about integration issues, transition issues, and whether or not people think ZFS will eventually be the default filesystem on OS X.

The issues I know are underdevelopment with ZFS are encryption and device/pool removal. I don't know if that affects the ZFS port to OS X. In the last SL forum we heard that in SL, ZFS had been integrated into the Finder quite substantially. We do not know about boot support, FileVault, and Time Machine integration.

Any thoughts, suggestions, theories, updates or anything related to ZFS to be posted here. Think app transition and support to integration etc.
 
I had heard that ZFS would only be implemented in Snow Leopard Server and now in the standard version. That would lead for ZFS implementation in the standard version for presumably 10.7.
 
What makes ZFS better on a desktop over HFS+ other than its something different?
 
My understanding (from info provided by Apple devs on the zfs mailing list) is that whilst ZFS for Time Machine would make a lot of sense, that's not something that Apple is working on, yet. There wont be any boot capability in Snow Leopard. I'd expect SL client to have the same ZFS support as SL server but SL server might have some GUI for managing pools.

They're working at ironing out all the bugs. The current version of Finder doesn't play nicely with ZFS all the time and ZFS support needs to be built into Disk Utility.

On feature that makes ZFS better than HFS+ is Snapshots. Snapshots allow you to rollback FS changes to a previously taken snapshot. Also ZFS is more robust, it's a FS that a lot less likely to corrupt.
 
What makes ZFS better on a desktop over HFS+ other than its something different?
Click to expand...
It's a much more modern filesystem that removed many of the legacy limits that have been dragged along in most other filesystems. Block sizes are variable, volume manipulation is much much simpler compared to the trouble you have to go through to resize/move partitions currently, snapshots are very welcome for features such as Shadow Copy / Time Machine and most importantly - performance is improved. It's like getting a better hard drive for free :D.

And that's just a portion of the stuff I find interesting, there's much more.
 
macosforge.org's FAQ indicates that they want a bootable zfs for the next osx release, maybe that's why zfs wasn't in the server developer build last go around?

I know zfs is only on sl server, but surely, they would have a developer release or something on client. The conversion to Cocoa will probably help, in that everyone can keep in mind the transition from HFS+ to ZFS, making it less of a headache.
 
MShock said:
The conversion to Cocoa will probably help, in that everyone can keep in mind the transition from HFS+ to ZFS, making it less of a headache.
Click to expand...
What does the transition to Cocoa have to do with the file system and how would that make it any easier to implement and support for ZFS?

S-
 
micsaund said:
Glad I wasn't the only one scratching my head and wondering what I was missing when I read that... ;)
Click to expand...

sorry, I should have been more specific. If there is a Finder rewrite in Cocoa, then I think people would be mindful of ZFS and future integration. Same goes for disk utility.
 
In a topic about solid state hybrid drives, some questions about ZFS:

ZVH said:
…
  1. I did a little reading, and from a data integrity standpoint it sounds like it kicks butt, but all the cross referencing sounds like it's time consuming. How does ZFS perform compared to HFS or other file systems performance wise?
  2. How would you say it's normally configured? Is it normal (or possible) to split a single drive in half and use one partition as the main scheme and the other as a backup, or is it preferable to use two drives?
  3. …
  4. How well adopted is this file system? I could see how this would be beneficial if not critical for servers, but would it make sense if there's a performance hit to use it on an end user system when it might simply be easier to just restore a backup?
…
Click to expand...

1. Performance

Some discussions in the OpenZFS on OS X area:

2. Configuration

You can have both ZFS and HFS Plus on the same disk but performance will suffer. I'll add a note of explanation.

3. Adoption

A 2013 question: Has anyone else in Sussex Mac User Group (SMUG) used ZFS?
 
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