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ZFS To Become Default File System In Leopard

SeaFox said:
But then, you would need the ability to have both devices hooked up at the same time, might be a problem with the limited expandability of some Macs.

Would it be possible to place the new drive in an external case, shuffle the documents over USB or Firewire, and then take the drive out of the case and stick it inside the computer in place of the drive we're replacing and have ZFS still see everything matching up?
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You could intentionally fail the drive and replace it with the new one, although that would be somewhat daring for some scenarios. Theoretically you could do what you are talking about with external enclosures although you would need to do it, export the file pool, rearrange the drives physically and then re-import the pool. The docs at OpenSolaris talk about this a little.
 
ChrisA said:
You are right. There is no way to do this with ANY file system. It's logically imposable. But what about the case where the machine has just one drive. I think 90% of the Macs sold will have only one drive. OK make that 99%. Not covering the odd case where a user has two drives of un-equal size seems unimportant in light of all the single drive systems

My guess is that ZFS will NOT be the default file system on single user desktop systems but will be used on servers. I'm pretty sure that right now, at least, you can't boot from ZFS.

Well ZFS would be of some use even on a single drive. It has that "Time Machine" thing built into it. It can't save you from a drive crash but it can a "ops I didn't mean to delete that paragraph. Let's restore the version from last week." Also ZFS can allow a full clean "point in time" backup of a drive that is in use.

ZFS looses most of what is good about it if you only have a few drives

What is going to be real interesting is to see how Apple handles the user interface for the administrator. Sun has done a truly horrible job at this. I hope Apple has come up with a way to make the admin job simpler. THe concepts that are inside ZFS ("virtual storage pools" "transactions"...) are way over the heads of most Mac users and require Sun Admins to hit the books pretty hard if they are going to be using ZFS.

Again I doubt Apple will make ZFS the default on syystems that have only a handful of drives. ZFS is for the systems with racks of drives to manage. Our system down stairs has hundreds of fiber channel drives and supports a few hundred users. This is what ZFS was created for.
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Even with only one drive the checksumming and copy-on-write features of ZFS make it more robust than other filesystems out there. It can't protect you from a physical drive failure but it sure helps keep your data from getting corrupted due to power surges and other sorts of non-failure anomalies.
 
Here are 10 reasons to reformat your hard drives with ZFS.

1. So easy your mom could administer it

ZFS is administered by two commands, zpool and zfs. Most tasks typically require a single command to accomplish. And the commands are designed to make sense. For example, check out the commands to create a RAID 1 mirrored filesystem and place a quota on its size.

2. Honkin' big filesystems

How big do filesystems need to be? In a world where 640KB is certainly not enough for computer memory, current filesystems have reached or are reaching the end of their usefulness. A 64-bit filesystem would meet today's need, but estimate of the lifetime of a 64-bit filesystem is about 10 years. Extending to 128-bits gives ZFS an expected lifetime of 30 years (UFS, for comparison, is about 20 years old). So how much data can you squeeze into a 128-bit filesystem? 16 exabytes or 18 million terabytes. How many files can you cram into a ZFS filesystem? 200 million million.

Could anyone use a fileystem that large? No, not really. The topic has roused discussions about boiling the oceans if a real life storage unit that size was powered on. It may not be necessary to have 128 bits, but it doesn't hurt and we won't have to worry about running out of addressable space.

3. Filesystem, heal thyself

ZFS employs 256 bit checksums end-to-end to validate data stored under its protection. Most filesystems (and you know who you are) depend on the underlying hardware to detect corrupted data and then can only nag about it if they get such a message. Every block in a ZFS filesystem has a checksum associated with it. If ZFS detects a checksum mismatch on a raidz or mirrored filesystem, it will actively reconstruct the block from the available redundancy and go on about its job.

4. fsck off, fsck

fsck has been voted out of the house. We don't need it anymore. Because ZFS data are always consistent on disk, don't be afraid to yank out those power cords if you feel like it. Your ZFS filesystems will never require you to enter the superuser password for maintenance mode.

5. Compress to your heart's content

I've always been a proponent of optional and appropriate compression in filesystems. There are some data that are well suited to compression such as server logs. Many people get ruffled up over this topic, although I suspect that they were once burned by doublespace munching up an important document. When thoughtfully used, ZFS compression can improve disk I/O which is a common bottleneck. ZFS compression can be turned on for individual filesystems or hierarchies with a very easy single command.

6. Unconstrained architecture

UFS and other filesystems use a constrained model of fixed partitions or volumes, each filesystem having a set amount of available disk space. ZFS uses a pooled storage model. This is a significant departure from the traditional concept of filesystems. Many current production systems may have a single digit number of filesystems and adding or manipulating existing filesystems in such an environment is difficult.

In ZFS, pools are created from physical storage. Mirroring or the new RAID-Z redundancy exists at the pool level. Instead of breaking pools apart into filesystems, each newly created filesystem shares the available space in the pool, although a minimum amount of space can be reserved for it. ZFS filesystems exist in their own hierarchy, children filesystems inherit the properties of their parents, and each ZFS filesystem in the hierarchy can easily be mounted in different places in the host filesystem.

7. Grow filesystems without green thumb

If your pool becomes overcrowded, you can grow it. With one command. On a live production system. Enough said.

8. Dynamic striping

On by default, dynamic striping automatically includes all deivces in a pool in writes simultaneously (stripe width spans all the avaiable media). This will speed up the I/O on systems with multiple paths to storage by load balancing the I/O on all of the paths.

9. The term "raidz" sounds so l33t

The new RAID-Z redundant storage model replaces RAID-5 and improves upon it. RAID-Z does not suffer from the "write hole" in which a stripe of data becomes corrupt because of a loss of power during the vulnerable period between writing the data and the parity. RAID-Z, like RAID-5, can survive the loss of one disk. A future release is planned using the keyword raidz2 which can tolerate the loss of two disks. Perhaps the best feature is that creating a raidz pool is crazy simple.

10. Clones with no ethical issues

The simple creation of snapshots and clones of filesystems makes living with ZFS so much more enjoyable. A snapshot is a read-only point-in-time copy of a filesystem which takes practically no time to create and uses no additional space at the beginning. Any snapshot can be cloned to make a read-write filesystem and any snapshot of a filesystem can be restored to the original filesystem to return to the previous state. Snapshots can be written to other storage (disk, tape), transferred to another system, and converted back into a filesystem.
 
ZFS for Leopard, I can't really say I'm surprised but I do think it would be a step in the right direction for user.
 
So...... the pool grows (optionally) when a new drive is added.

What happens when a drive is going to be removed/replaced? I suppose there would be an option to re-flow the data across the remaining drive(s).

Sorry if it's been covered already, but I only read the first and last page.

Psi
 
Follow the link in the original Post, but here is another

syklee26 said:
come someone explain this poor noob what ZFS system is and what it does as well as benefits of it?
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http://cmynhier.blogspot.com/2006/05/zfs-benchmarking.html


THen long and short of it is the file system is incharge of reading/writing to your HD. ZFS allows for priority of reads and forces writes to queue until the read requests are done. THis means that the system will be responsive to you even during a long file copy.
THat is a very overly simplified description - but it makes for a faster hard drive read/write for the end user.

But I am concerned, as you cannot yet boot from a ZFS volume.
 
psionic001 said:
So...... the pool grows (optionally) when a new drive is added.

What happens when a drive is going to be removed/replaced? I suppose there would be an option to re-flow the data across the remaining drive(s).
Click to expand...

Yes, but you would need enough space in the remaining drives to hold the data of the one you're replacing. This is the one sticking point for the whole ease-of-use-for-the-masses thing. How many people upgrade their hard drives before they actually fill them completely?

I only have about 10% space remaining on my current (80GB) drive. But I have a 250GB in an external case with plenty of room and my older internal (30GB) I can shuffle stuff to in an emergency.
 
This is excellent news. I love ZFS, and I can't wait to see it in Leopard. However... all is not rosy when it comes to ZFS.

  • Will the adoption of ZFS spell the final death knell for the Classic environment?
  • Sure, x86 Macs can boot ZFS now. What about PowerPC Macs?
  • Will switching require a reformat?
  • What applications, if any (besides the disk utilities) will ZFS completely break?
  • Any other questions brought up in this thread, since I can't be bothered to read all 8 pages of posts :p
 
wrldwzrd89 said:
This is excellent news. I love ZFS, and I can't wait to see it in Leopard. However... all is not rosy when it comes to ZFS.

  • Will the adoption of ZFS spell the final death knell for the Classic environment?
  • Sure, x86 Macs can boot ZFS now. What about PowerPC Macs?
  • Will switching require a reformat?
  • What applications, if any (besides the disk utilities) will ZFS completely break?
  • Any other questions brought up in this thread, since I can't be bothered to read all 8 pages of posts :p
Click to expand...

1. i hope so. and yes it should.
2. the architecture doesn't matter, at least thats what ive been lead to believe earlier in this thread.
3. quite possible. who knows at this point though, Apple could pull a trick out of its hat.
4. hard to say, but thanks to CoreData and similar APIs i think we'll be okay
 
wrldwzrd89 said:
This is excellent news. I love ZFS, and I can't wait to see it in Leopard. However... all is not rosy when it comes to ZFS.

  • Will the adoption of ZFS spell the final death knell for the Classic environment?
  • Sure, x86 Macs can boot ZFS now. What about PowerPC Macs?
  • Will switching require a reformat?
  • What applications, if any (besides the disk utilities) will ZFS completely break?
  • Any other questions brought up in this thread, since I can't be bothered to read all 8 pages of posts :p
Click to expand...

Surely Intel spelt the death knell for Classic. Does the inception of ZFS inherently break classic applications, do they even see that the disk is ZFS or is that don by the OS?

Surely it is about time that classic went away anyway. 6 years was a long time ago. Actually writing that made me think about XP and Vista, if this were true on the other side of the fence then it would mean the end of XP booting on new machines (slightly difference scenario but shows how far OS X has come)
 
ClimbingTheLog said:
DavidCar said:
But would it be possible with ZFS to just save a snapshot of a large file or set of files once every few minutes, or on request, and have it just store the changed information?
Click to expand...
Yes. Whether the GUI exposes this is an open question.
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In that case, could this ZFS snapshot capability become available to application programmers so they can make their application files become infinitely undo-able?
 
heisetax said:
If this is true, I wonder which came first, ZFS or Time Machine? Or are they all part of one thing?

Bill the TaxMan
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IIRC the first strain of Time Machine works with HFS+ and doesn't currently work with ZFS (latest released developer builds)

However the specification of ZFS may have done something with the idea of Time Machine and the final integration between the two will be the best possible solution.
 
ppc_michael said:
ZFS creates sort of a "pool," right? Like if I plug in another hard drive, I don't see it as an individual drive, my free space just goes up?

How would that work with things like thumb drives where you want specific files on specific devices? What about things like scratch disks for video capture?

ZFS is exciting, I'm not trying to complain. Just curious. ;)
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You can pool disks together. Just because a new disk is inserted it doesn't mean it will add it to the pool, that is a manual process. You can also add a disk but only add some of the space to the pool.
 
xUKHCx said:
Suppose it could work like the FAT32 to NTFS upgrade.

Bring on ZFS, if it isn't the defualt but can boot from it then I will be using ZFS anyway.

From earlier reports it seems like they have fully got behind ZFS which is good for all mac users.
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No it won't. NTFS was an extension of FAT32. ZFS is not an extension of anything, but created from scratch. They weren't concerned with backwards compatibility as the OS can handle using more than one FS.
 
Lanbrown said:
No it won't. NTFS was an extension of FAT32. ZFS is not an extension of anything, but created from scratch. They weren't concerned with backwards compatibility as the OS can handle using more than one FS.
Click to expand...

But why does that exclude the way in which a conversion between HFS+ to ZFS can't work in the same sort of fashion as the conversion between FAT32 and NTFS. i.e. the OS goes into a mode where the user can't change data and converts the file system.
 
wrldwzrd89 said:
This is excellent news. I love ZFS, and I can't wait to see it in Leopard. However... all is not rosy when it comes to ZFS.

  • Will the adoption of ZFS spell the final death knell for the Classic environment?
  • Sure, x86 Macs can boot ZFS now. What about PowerPC Macs?
  • Will switching require a reformat?
  • What applications, if any (besides the disk utilities) will ZFS completely break?
  • Any other questions brought up in this thread, since I can't be bothered to read all 8 pages of posts :p
Click to expand...

Other FS will still be supported. Classic on the PowerPC side might just have to be on a different partition.
PowerPC will be able to boot ZFS. The chip doesn't know a thing about a FS, that is the job of the OS.
You won't be able to convert from one FS to another as they are not compatible. Nothing new here.
Virtually all applications don't talk directly to the disk, that is the job of the OS. Talking directly to hardware in not a UNIX trait.
 
Being but a simple graphic designer and most of what I'm reading making about as much sense as a C++ manual written in Swahili, it looks like this would have a huge impact, more in the corporate sector than the home. Would I be right in saying Apple might start selling a few more Xserves if they took the corporate market seriously, with an implementation of ZFS?
 
I am sooo geeked about this that I actually downloaded real player just to watch the video.

And that would take a lot for me.

ZFS would place OS/X light years ahead of Microsoft and NTFS, and with some wel thought out disk utility in System Preferences, you could get some phenominal technology in the hands of end-users where it belongs.

Plus, it makes Time Machine REAL.

Man I hope this is true.
 
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