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ZFS Read/Write Developer Beta for Leopard

kamiboy said:
Are you serious? I mean, do you know for fact that Apple is looking to improve I/O priority with Leopard or do you just assume so.

Because if they are, and if Leopard rids me of my most abhorred nemesis, the beach ball of doom, then that is friggin awesome beyond words. Seriously, OS freeze ups during I/O operations have been the most annoying part of computers for me ever since I started using one.
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Apple said:
Autofs.
The brand-new multithreaded autofs filesystem layer keeps track of which paths are actually located on remote AFP, SMB, or NFS fileservers — even across symlinks — and automatically mounts the appropriate server. The Finder and other applications needn’t wait for one mount to complete before requesting another. Now you can specify automount paths for your entire organization using the same standard automounter maps (e.g., NIS) supported by Linux or Solaris.
Streaming I/O.
The new IOStream class in IOKit provides a high-level API for managing DMAs and other high-bandwidth data transfers, without the need to optimize caching strategies for different hardware architectures. This also forms the basis of the new IOVideo family, designed to support professional-level video cards. These new APIs make it easier for developers to take full advantage of both cutting-edge and previous-generation hardware.
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These two changes, by themselves, are going to banish many of the networking beachballs, and some local beachballs too (at least the ones in the Finder).
 
rob@robburns.co said:
ZFS may be more processor intensive than HFS+
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It rarely is.
rob@robburns.co said:
may actually benchmark slower in some circumstances.
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It also has a very agressive in-memory cache, so it can benchmark much much higher than concurrent FS.
rob@robburns.co said:
4) many other features such as compression and encryption can be added to the file system that won't rely on kernel level support.
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Compression already exists and can be activated and deactivated on the fly.
 
Answering Machine

Ok, this is completely off topic, but kind of in the same vein. Any one else notice in Leopard 9A466 that iChat 4.0 has removed the "Answering Machine" option? What is that all about? I was really hoping that had something to do with the iPhone and video conferencing. :confused:
 
CJD2112 said:
Ok, this is completely off topic, but kind of in the same vein. Any one else notice in Leopard 9A466 that iChat 4.0 has removed the "Answering Machine" option? What is that all about? I was really hoping that had something to do with the iPhone and video conferencing. :confused:
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I'm guessing that it has nothing to do with the ZFS work, and got moved to the Finder along with all the "Desktop Sharing" stuff.
 
No it won't be

DrAtheist said:
Wow, it's going to be a huge pain in the ass to wipe and reformat my system and backups when 10.5.x +1[1] (whichever includes ZFS) comes out...

[1]if you think I'm jumping on board with this one immediately... this is the file system we're talking about here, normally I install updates as soon as they come out, but I'll wait to change my filesystem until it's proven
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Here is the beautiful thing. They can soft repartition your drive internally, make one of the partitions ZFS, transfer all your files to it, and then grow the ZFS drive to the whole drive. It will be slow but should be painless. They could even do part of the files, grow the partition, do more, and so on, thereby requiring only some minimal amount of free disk space.

ZFS is pretty reliable and should be more than HFS+. The only problem is the Mac implementation thereof which may not be.
 
JonHimself said:
I'm still assuming that this was always the case but Mr. Jobs got pissed when the other guy (can't remember his name even though I just read it in the article) said it would be in Leopard. He probably was going to at least mention it at WWDC but just pulled it so that it didn't really get any publicity.
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Somebody call Jobs a waaaambulance.

sparkleytone said:
It works just fine without ZFS.
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If you have two drives. Like, not Apple's best-selling lines of computers (14% of laptop market).

localoid said:
ZFS isn't a file system for the average home consumer, but nine out of ten average home consumers are obsessed with it because they believe it possesses "magical" qualities. Eight out of ten are fascinated with it simply because think "ZFS" is a cool-sounding name that must be "really fast". :rolleyes:
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You obviously have no idea what ZFS does. Single-drive Time Machine, on-the-fly compression (faster than raw), self-healing, hardware error correction... stop me when I get to something that a home user doesn't need... no more need for DiskWarrior, no more invalid sibling links... OK, I don't have all day.
 
I bet that we'll see ZFS first as a RAID Format option and as a feature of a future release of Xsan. Those would be the first products to benefit from ZFS.

But it'll come quickly to Client after that.

It'll be interesting to see how it's deployed. I'll wager you'll have to backup, reformat your drive, and then restore to make the transition to ZFS. Major pain for the stand alone user with little immediate benefit. But users with big Mac Pros or RAIDs/Sans will easily make the sacrifice.
 
Don't know if anybody has noticed this yet, but apparently apple has pulled the ZFS beta from the developer site. i saw it this morning and now it's gone. :(
 
Infinity said:
Ok excuse my ignorance, can someone explain the real world advantages (no techno-mumbo-jumbo) of ZFS to the average consumer? Doesn't Time Machine work without ZFS anyway? There just seems to be so much hype about this filesystem; am I missing something that will change my life of computing so dramatically? Or, does one need to be a system admin that manages a huge amount of data to see the true advantage of ZFS?
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If you are running a single user home system with just one disk drive ZFS is not much use to you. However if you have many users, racks of drives and many terra bytes of data ZFS is revolutionary.

As an example you can add space to a file system by adding drives and there is not need to take the system down, rebuild the file system and re-boot. Nice feature for some users but home users are never likely to want to try this. Even today how many home users use RAID5 or a mirror? ZFS could be usful to those users. It could work on a single drive system but there is less to gain at the low end
 
soup4you2 said:
Don't know if anybody has noticed this yet, but apparently apple has pulled the ZFS beta from the developer site. i saw it this morning and now it's gone. :(
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Damn, I knew I should have downloaded it when I first saw it. Grrr...Well, I did get the PDF readme file at least.

What published reports?
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Well, I guess by "published report" they meant "its posted directly on the ADC site for download already." At least until now.

You know, ZFS support actually is much more appealing to me than many of the Leopard changes that Apple is counting as their "big" features. ZFS Time Machine backups are going to be awesomely space-efficient, not to mention that with zfs send/recv it'll be super easy to keep an external, off-site backup over ssh on my campus network. That's an awesome benefit for people with laptops who can't rely on always being connected to an external BUD for regular snapshots. If only we can get easy Time Machine support for stuff like this, Leopard will be awesome.
 
Stridder44 said:
I'm confused on this. The initial release of 10.5.0 will have ZFS support but no read/write? So basically no support? What's the point if you can't even do anything with it like, you know, actually reading/writing?


That's like giving someone a book that doesn't have any pages, and that they'll get the pages a couple months from now.
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And its like the NTFS in OSX:rolleyes:
 
Geez, all this drama over a file system. It's too much for me!

*goes back to fantasizing about buying iPhone 2.0 when my Verizon contract expires in September 2008.
 
ZFS in command line

Playing with Leopard 9A466 ...
There is a command line tool called "zfs"
when I "sudo zfs"

I receive this message :
"ZFS Readonly implemntation is loaded!
To download the full ZFS read/write kext with all functionality enabled, please go to http://developer.apple.com
Read-Only ZFS Implementation"

Interesting...
 
MacsRgr8 said:
No reason posted??

No warning: "DON'T USE THE ZFS BETA!!"..?
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Got it this morning and yes it is gone. Funny thing is the name of it is:

leopard_9a477_zfsbetaseed1_06135234.dmg

The build of Leopard at WWDC was 9A466 so maybe a new build coming for it?
 
Krevnik said:
Although Journaled HFS+ doesn't require a firmware update in order to boot off of it, ZFS would (if they choose to go that route).
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No, it wouldn't. You can boot an Intel Mac with file systems other than HFS+ right now. Nothing to do with firmware. You're confusing BIOS emulation in EFI I think :)
 
padmasana said:
I'm more excited about ZFS than the iPhone.
Heaven help me. Is this wrong?
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Too be honest, I am too. I mean the iPhone is awesome and all, but its still a bit out of my price range. Actual performance improvements and changes like this are what Apple needs to push.
 
drlunanerd said:
No, it wouldn't. You can boot an Intel Mac with file systems other than HFS+ right now. Nothing to do with firmware. You're confusing BIOS emulation in EFI I think :)
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I'm not so sure about that. Support for booting an OS from a drive formatted as ZFS doesn't just magically appear as soon as the filesystem appears.
 
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