ZFS Project Page at MacOSForge

[mrfrosty]

The best way to learn about ZFS is to use it. If you have VMware Fusion then download a copy of Solaris 10 (It's free) and run Solaris inside a VM and try out ZFS first hand. Solaris runs well inside Fusion if you have 2GB on a dual core Intel Mac.

What I find is that Sun's interface is not very good and while usable by much of Sun's user base it would be a unworkable on a Mac. This is why Im following ZFS on and mac. I really can't wait to see how Apple handles the user interface issue. Let's hope they think of something new

Actually it's not that bad on solaris....if you really have to there is a web gui to zfs. I cant remember what port it runs on though

 

[Woutje]

Imagine ZFS, a state-of-the-art filesystem, on one of those upcoming Samsung Solid State Disks (www.samsungssd.com).

Performance would never drop anymore on a system that hasn't been formatted in years.

 

[Analog Kid]

Sign in (as an online member or above) and go to the software downloads area. Not the pre-release software. There will be some categories down the left, in the middle is Mac OS X, you'll find the ZFS preview in there.

Ah yes, thank you much! I guess the OS categories aren't what I expected them to be. Suppose it makes sense that the file system would be grouped with the operating system.

Imagine ZFS, a state-of-the-art filesystem, on one of those upcoming Samsung Solid State Disks (www.samsungssd.com).

Performance would never drop anymore on a system that hasn't been formatted in years.

I don't think ZFS is optimized for flash drives. Given all the background scrubbing and processing that's done, it may not be all that well suited.

I'd have to look at it more. Erasure is Flash's achilles heel. If that's not managed well, it will grind down any FS when transferred to Flash.

 

[russell.h]

Sun want's to keep ZFS in the GPL whereas NetAPPS want's it to stay proprietary and charge SUN... Apple has licensed ZFS using the GPL.

Thats wrong, ZFS is licensed under the CDDL.

 

[timothyjay2004]

I have a question about this. If I wanted to later erase my mac hard drive and use ZFS when it comes out, how exactly will this occur? ZFS won't be on the Disk Utility portion of the Leopard DVD that I currently have now, so would they have a image file that you download and burn that will allow you to boot, format the hard drive, then switch disks to copy the file system over? How exactly will ZFS be implemented when it occurs?

 

[Analog Kid]

I have a question about this. If I wanted to later erase my mac hard drive and use ZFS when it comes out, how exactly will this occur? ZFS won't be on the Disk Utility portion of the Leopard DVD that I currently have now, so would they have a image file that you download and burn that will allow you to boot, format the hard drive, then switch disks to copy the file system over? How exactly will ZFS be implemented when it occurs?

Are you asking if you can boot a clean Mac from ZFS? That's a good question... Last I heard, you couldn't boot from ZFS at all (even Solaris was just getting this together), but I don't see anything in the Apple docs on this.

Even if they have gotten OS X booting though, you wouldn't be able to boot a new machine from it. You'd have to get it far enough along to install the dev beta.

 

[wafl iron]

it's "NetApp" not "NetAPPS"

 

[hohlecow]

When trying to install the ZFS beta, I get the following error:

You cannot install ZFS on this volume. This volume does not meet the requirements for this update.

Any ideas? Could it be incompatible with 10.5.1?

 

[Catfish_Man]

I think Apple needs to work on Leopard's bugs/shortcomings before even thinking about ZFS. Sure, a revision 0 of a new operating system will have its share of bugs..... but they had another 5+ months to work on it, and apparently didn't.

Ahahaha. If you think Leopard is buggy now, you should have seen it a few months ago. Besides, what makes you think the ZFS team had anything to do with the Leopard release?

 

[ChrisA]

For those wanting to check out ZFS first hand.... Solaris with ZFS installed is available form Sun as a virual machine that can be run inside Fusion. If you have Fusion it is just "download and go" no installation. It "just works". I tried it using VMware on Linux and Fusion of Mac OS X. Either way it was the most painless Solaris install I've ever seen. I gave the Solaris VM two processors and 1GB of RAM and it runs very well.

If you want to learn about ZFS don't even bother with Apple's current implementation, not when the "real deal" is free and completely painless to install. It's worth doig the install just so you get the current documentation and man pages. All the questions that come up on these boards are answered there in the most definitive way.

I have to say this is astounding. I can install the Solaris VM on a small external drive and run it on my Linux system at work. Then I put the VM in "sleep" mode, unplug the drive take it home, plug it into my iMac, restore the VM and my Solaris desktop has all the open windows and icons just as I left them.

To get it look here: http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=4702f982

 

[Nugget]

Thanks for the link to the Fusion image. That's really cool!

 

[jccbin]

ZFS is being folded into FreeBSD 7

For those who wonder, ZFS is being folded into FreeBSD 7, due in 2008. Mac OS X has its roots in FreeBSD. It is possible that the inclusion in FBSD7 and its inclusion in Leo are complementary.