Some key features that Sun was touting last year for the Solaris 10 platform are still missing in action. The two most important are the Project Janus Linux runtime environment and the ZFS file system. While there has been much speculation that Sun will withdraw support for Project Janus, this is not the case.
How long can we expect to wait for ZFS? Will it be out before the end of the year or will be be something to look forward to next year? TIA
Sun……..they never deliver
that NFS was a real file system on disk, but rather a network protocol. Maybe I was wrong..
So it can easily be ported and included in Linux? I guess same goes for the BSDs? I don’t know much about the opensolaris license thought.
Would be awesome with the same filesystem for all of them, many oses, one home, yes please.
This one of the first long posts on ZFS – http://www.sun.com/2004-0914/feature/. Although it is architecture-neutral, being able to be used on x86 and Sparc with no endian problems, it is a feature native only to Solaris and it’s deriviatives, at least for the time being.
Does ZFS support clustering? If not, I can’t see it replacing Veritas in most enterprise systems.
Yes, it does. That, and it’s 128-bit.
I mean multiple cluster nodes simulatenously accessing the same file system?
As far as I can tell, yes, it does provide for that.
The details are still a bit sketchy on some areas; I still the CONCEPT of ZFS is being fleshed out.
It would be nice had they got the information right; its NFS = Network File System, and it was NEVER used as a filesystem on a disk – SUN has always used UFS for their standard file system.
The CDDL is not compatible with the GPL so you’ll almost certainly never see ZFS included in the official kernel tree.
Maybe not in the official kernel tree, but couldn’t it be available as a seperate package that when installed compiles a set of kernel modules?
Yes, you as an individual could install it as a module.
My line of thinking was that the fact that it can’t be part of the kernel proper immediately limits it’s chance of becoming a player in Linux filesystems. Not that Sun would particularly care about that particular outcome.
Sun needs to stop focussing on ZFS and get crackin on some x86 hardware drivers. If Janus is going to be able to aid them in porting linux drivers over to Solaris then concentrate on Janus. Else they should put all of their effort on getting those drivers into Solaris within the next 6 months or the OpenSolaris project will be dead!
“Else they should put all of their effort on getting those drivers into Solaris within the next 6 months or the OpenSolaris project will be dead!”
ha ha ha Reading stuff like this makes me laugh. Take a deep breath Anonymous, OpenSolaris will be fine, moving at the pace it is moving. Which IMO is much faster then I expected.
ZFS is very important to us server people. DiskSuite has always been 2nd class citizen to Veritas (volume and filesystem wise). ZFS will give us Veritas abilities, but for free. Being a server guy I would much rather have that then be able to run Solaris on some old PC, or some laptop.
LOL, ZFS is going to revolutionize UNIX storage, and you want them to piss that all away on drivers for your $15 PeeCee video card?
ZFS is some serious shit, and Sun is taking the time to do it right, even risking not having it back in January or even the Q2 update.
Janus is slightly less significant, in my book, but, still, with Containers, it will allow running Linux and Solaris side-by-side with complete resource management. That’s pretty cool.
Drivers for OpenSolaris will come in time. There really is a large Solaris enthusiast community, even if Slashdot doesn’t think so. Also, in many respects compared to Linux, Solaris actually makes sense, or at least is documented, so lots of commercial developers ought to like OpenSolaris, too.
Be patient. Sun is really on to something, IMO.
True, also, IIRC, there were a couple of SUN Employees who pointed out that ZFS and the infrastructure exposed a large number of bugs and so forth that needed to be fixed before putting ZFS in, also, another employee outlined the the fact that the current crop of tools to maintain ZFS have been re-written from scratch.
At the same time, why the heck would one want to purchase a computer from anyone else, considering how cheap the Ultra 20 are. They’re bloody good value, chuck on Solaris 10, and voila, a very nice desktop/workstation at consumer level prices.
LOL, ZFS is going to revolutionize UNIX storage, and you want them to piss that all away on drivers for your $15 PeeCee video card?
No drivers for x86 hardware equals no one using Solaris, no matter how good the filesystem is.
uh, you mean, the GPL is not compatible to the CDDL?
the CDDL would allow for having different licenses for other parts of the code (as long as they cover different source files), however the GPL doesn’t allow linking in such a scenario.
that’s okay, as the objective of the GPL needs that feature: if you want a certain pool of code abide to a certain bunch of conditions full-stop, you have to ghetto-ize it a bit (as with CDDL, and most other OSI licenses really, you can reuse the code without opening your parts of the new work under the same terms)
they do work on drivers: broadcom w-lan stuff is work in process, acpi stuff is being worked on, nvidia just released their driver after an agreement with sun.
driver situation is improving all the time (solaris express works fine on boxes that barely work at all with solaris 10)
ZFS indeed looks cool, both for enterprise and desktop usage. personally i like the measures they have taken to protect the data. From the Sun website:
Provable data integrity
ZFS protects all data with 64-bit checksums that detect and correct silent data corruption.
Data can be corrupted in a number of ways, such as a system error or an unexpected power outage, but ZFS removes this fear of the unknown. ZFS prevents data corruption by keeping data self-consistent at all times. All operations are transactional. This not only maintains consistency but also removes almost all of the constraints on I/O order and allows changes to succeed or fail as a whole.
All operations are also copy-on-write. Live data is never overwritten. ZFS writes data to a new block before changing the data pointers and committing the write. Copy-on-write provides several benefits:
Always-valid on-disk state
Consistent, reliable backups
Data rollback to known point in time
“We validate the entire I/O stack, start to finish, no guesswork involved. It’s all provable data integrity,” says Bonwick.
Administrators will never again have to run laborious recovery procedures, such as fsck, even if the system is shut down in an unclean fashion. In fact, Solaris Kernel engineers Bill Moore and Matt Ahrens have subjected ZFS to more than a million forced, violent crashes in the course of their testing. Not once has ZFS lost data integrity or leaked a single block.
Additionally, ZFS is the only file system that conducts end-to-end 64-bit checksums on all data to prevent silent data corruption. When any data is read, the checksum is verified to ensure that the data that the application wrote is what is returned.
“The cost of doing something like a checksum is no longer prohibitive. Burning a small percentage of the CPU to know that data is intact is a price that administrators would gladly pay,” says Moore.
As part of Sun’s quest to build truly self-healing systems (see the September 7 Sun.com feature), ZFS can self-heal data in a mirrored or RAID configuration. When one copy is damaged, ZFS detects it via the checksum and uses another copy to repair it.
No competing product can do this. Traditional mirrors can only handle total failure of a device. They don’t have checksums, so they have no idea when a device returns bad data. So even though mirrors replicate data, they have no way to take advantage of it. By contrast, the end-to-end checksums in ZFS allow it to find and fix bad blocks–with nineteen nines certainty–automatically.
Do you know how ZFS compares to EVMS?
This new OS news site. Particularly the navigation. It’s confusing and I don’t read that many replies anymore. I have to constantly click aroung and getting lost in the levels of reply. The old ‘one straight list’ was WAY better.
“…with nineteen nines certainty…”
=-O
My god, is this the first time a RAID is actually more reliable than the computer itself…by several orders of magnitude?