Apparantly, Apple is interested in porting Sun Solaris’ ZFS to Mac OS X. From the zfs-discuss mailinglist: “Chris Emura, the Filesystem Development Manager within Apple’s CoreOS organization is interested in porting ZFS to OS X. For more information, please e-mail him directly at [email address]. Speaking for the zfs team (at Sun), this is great news and we fully support the effort.”
Apple Interested in Solaris’ ZFS
85 Comments
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s_groening…This is just one of numerous points that make Mac OS X somewhat seem like OS/2 in its days…
You often had to install applications on HPFS (High Performance File System) in order for them to work, mainly because of the support for long filenames, and possibly a few other technicalities…
Apart from that, just to mention, is the way everything seems to be drag’n’drop oriented, the nature of the WinOS/2 vs Classic Environment is also a lot alike
…But then again, I’ve always loved OS/2…. -It’s always been way more stable than my female relationships
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present_armsraid on my home linux box is the dogs dangly bits (thats good) i have 2 ide drives one on each cable and used software raid built in to linux to make raid 1, it goes rapid… useful for all kinds of things (openoffice is quick now
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It would be fantastic to have the great features and robustness of ZFS underlying OS X. HFS+ is so last century.
how is HFS+ last century? curious.
Good question. I have little familiarity with ZFS, but HFS+ is certainly more sophisticated than what you see on Windows.
I have little familiarity with ZFS, but HFS+ is certainly more sophisticated than what you see on Windows.
In which ways? I’m not choosing either side, I’m just curious. I don’t really give a rat’s ass about what filesystem I use, so I know little about it.
God I hate NTFS and its defragging problem. Try a little experiment. Defrag your computer and I mean offline and online defrag. Then reboot, you will see your computer boot fast in less than 20 seconds….well mine does anyway….reboot 3-4 more times and watch your boot times grow longer and longer as the disk gets more fragmented because of all the I/O that is being done. That is the single biggest problem I have….is fragmentation with NTFS.
Are you sure thats not the prefetching optimisaton on XP?
God I hate NTFS and its defragging problem. Try a little experiment. Defrag your computer and I mean offline and online defrag. Then reboot, you will see your computer boot fast in less than 20 seconds….well mine does anyway….reboot 3-4 more times and watch your boot times grow longer and longer as the disk gets more fragmented because of all the I/O that is being done. That is the single biggest problem I have….is fragmentation with NTFS.
I’m going totally OT here, but from my past experience with 2K/XP, wiping the swap and then setting it to a fixed size after a defrag helps a lot with this problem. Windows will create the swap in a contiguous space so it doesn’t become fragmented, helps with a quicker bootup and slightly better performance overall.
But you’re right, defragging ntfs is a PITA.
Regarding a fixed swap to prevent disk slowing due to fragmentation and/or resizing, for those with 2GB of RAM fix the swap size at 0.
Completely disabling swap is not recommended in Windows. I’ve never personally tried it on my box with 2 GB of RAM, but I’ve heard that some programs cease to function when no page file is available.
I’ve never had any issues with running windows without swap. My xp machine has 1gb of ram and hasn’t had swap in years. no problems. Don’t believe everything you hear/read.
Heh … awesome. I’ll play around with that the next time I’m at work and have access to some of our more powerful hardware.
Can’t say for sure, but I am pretty sure you still have a swap file. Windows does not allow for a zero-size swap. It then creates one automatically.
A disk won’t get fragmented just because of I/O going on. It will get fragmented if you’re appending to files after you’ve consolidated all of your free space (and packed the files in close to each other).
I call bullshit on this test, as I deal with 3-4 PCs getting benchmarked every day, and fragmentation only goes up minimally (ie. 3%) every few days.
Not really. NTFS is actually fairly sophisticated. For example, it was built with journaling in mind, while HFS+ had journaling bolted-on as an afterthought.
All the merits go out the window when one has to waste time defragmenting.
No one said you have to defragment. Out of the 35 Windows users that I know better, only 2 regularly defragment. The other 33 don’t have any problems. 🙂
Hmm…true defragging is not required….but it is for having decent I/O performance isnt it?
Indeed, but NTFS fragmentation isn’t even close to being as bad as the parent made it out to be.
Indeed, but NTFS fragmentation isn’t even close to being as bad as the parent made it out to be.
NTFS fragmentation is bad. It is very bad. In fact most typical users have highly fragmented hard drives. They download music and movies and then delete them and download more music. They install and uninstall crapware. Normal usage like this fragments the hell out of NTFS to the point where it is almost unusable. I don’t think constant removal of spyware is very helpful either, at least to the state of an NTFS file system.
Not really. NTFS is actually fairly sophisticated.
Absolutely. NTFS is one of the best things MS has ever done. Compression, encryption, journaling — it’s an advanced FS by most accounts. Completely closing off outside support for it has somewhat invalidated that for multisystem users like me, though. Also, I think it still stores entries by filename, so it can’t have hard links and just doesn’t have symlinks, but the Windows line was never particularly about hands-on control, so few will miss those.
Anyway, the complaint was about fragmentation. I remember how happy everyone was back in the day about how much better the Win2K defragmenter was than the 98 one. NTFS itself didn’t help any. MS didn’t design around that little problem. They just improved the tool to manage it.
For example, it was built with journaling in mind, while HFS+ had journaling bolted-on as an afterthought.
Successfully, without breaking backwards compatibility. OS9 can still boot from a journaled HFS (but won’t access the journal). Let’s see 98 even access an NTFS volume. The first version of NTFS is older than FAT32. There’s no excuse for the complete lack of included support in the 9x line. But I digress.
Apple has been very conservative with filesystems. Their own HFS is getting up there, and UFS (which they support with OSX) is about 30 years old now. I know Apple doesn’t have a reputation for backwards compatibility, but it’s very important to them in this case. They’d rather see the user buy all new software and hardware in order to upgrade than lose one byte of data.
With the new Intel Macs, they jumped over to the default filesystem for EFI so they could have nice, shiny software-firmware integration. Apart from that, I know nothing about it. If they’re considering ZFS, their comfort with it must come from the fact that Sun is a big name with lots of experience and a reputation of reliability behind it. But I don’t think it would ever be used for the system partition (i.e., replacing HFS/EFI in any way.) ZFS was designed primarily for storage. There aren’t even any Solares that can boot from it yet. If the post is for real, it sounds like Apple might be looking to sweeten their oft overlooked Xserve / SAN product lines.
I really hope ZFS makes it into Leopard. I’d love to turn my G4 into a low-power (as in, electricity) fileserver once I get a new system. I’d put Solaris on my Athlon server right now if I could trust that I’d be able to add and upgrade software.
This is certainly a throw away comment. NTFS can store double the amount of information on volumes and file size. Up to 16 exebytes. HFS+ can store 8 exebytes. NTFS is actually a very advanced file system with refinements happening with every release of Windows.
Of course, that can’t be the only differences, maybe you should checkout this and see what other factors come into play:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems
P.S I do own a powerbook and absolutely love it. Modern filesystems don’t mean much on smaller laptops but can play an important role on larger systems.
NTFS is also NOT OPEN.
http://www.sun.com/2004-0914/feature/ ZFS is ENDIAN NEUTRAL, this is a reason why Apple is intrested in it. They can jump architectures easier in the future.
What license is this, Sun’s own tight license?
Edited 2006-04-29 15:05
ZFS is under Sun’s CDDL license, which is probably one of the reason’s Apple is interested in it. After all it doesn’t contain any viral clause (like the GPL), though any changes Apple make to files licensed under CDDL need to be released under that license.
Basically it’s the best of BSD and GPL licenses combined. The original coder/community gets any improvement to the code (ala GPL), and commercial companies can include it in the OS/whatever and not have ro relicense their entire codebase (ala BSD)
Which is the same you can do with LGPL
That’s all fine and dandy. No one mentioned LGPL though. GPL != LGPL.
That’s hardly a point.
“After all it doesn’t contain any viral clause (like the GPL), though any changes Apple make to files licensed under CDDL need to be released under that license. ”
I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.
“though any changes Apple make to files licensed under CDDL need to be released under that license”
is exactly the “viral problem” people describe in the GPL.
The GPL applies the fullest definition of “derivied work” reasonable within copyright law. The CDDL applies a much narrower definition of “derived work”, based on files. Under the GPL, if you use a file from a GPL’ed program in your program, your whole program must be GPL’ed. Under the CDDL, you can use a file from a CDDL’ed program in yours, but you can keep the other files under whatever license you want, as long as you publish any changes you make to the CDDL’ed file.
To use an analogy, the GPL says: “if you use any pages from this book in yours, your book is a derived work.” The CDDL says: “you can use pages from this book in yours, but the only pages that are derived works are modifications of the page you use.”
Well then. It’d appear I’m the one who doesn’t know what he’s talking about 😉
is exactly the “viral problem” people describe in the GPL.
No, what makes the GPL viral is that GPL + any other file == GPL. It’s like being “infected” by a virus. If I have a virus and infect you, then you are infected as well.
Whereas using CDDL items is like being near a non-contagious infected person. Unless you do certain things you don’t become infected
> NTFS is also NOT OPEN.
Of course it isn’t. Who claimed otherwise? And how does it make it less superior?
It means that the other operating systems on your multi boot system cannot access files on your Windows partition. That does make it less useful in my book, and thus less superior.
Imagine if all operating systems used open file systems. Not necessarily open source, just properly documented. Wouldn’t that take away most of the data sharing pain we all take as part of life today?
If Apple switched to ZFS, dual booting OS X + Linux would be far more convenient than Windows + Linux.
I doubt it.
I still havent found a very stable ext3/reiser drivers *for* Windows.
Just because its open source doesn’t mean much in some things.
Also, you can access (including write) to NTFS filesystems from Linux, I currently do it on Ubuntu and its fine.
http://www.linux-ntfs.org/
That’s because the IFS (Installable File System) Kit for Windows (which includes the required headers to make the development process feasible) costs around 150$ and few lone developers are going to buy it. I think the last time I checked the kit costed several times the current price.
I doubt it.
I still havent found a very stable ext3/reiser drivers *for* Windows.
Just because its open source doesn’t mean much in some things.
Linux is a little guy created by programmers all over the world of varying tastes and interests, so they work to be able to access and manipulate all forms of data.
Apple is kind of a little guy and wants its users to be able to have access to their data, and so includes support for major filesystems where it sees it as practical (FAT, NTFS, UFS).
Microsoft is a big guy that wants to stay the big guy, and thus doesn’t want any revolving doors on their platform. Windows XP supports exactly two filesystems (three variants each), both of them Microsoft native, and MS is a ton less helpful in allowing amateur developers to write drivers than they are with apps. A closed filesystem or just a closed system in general will allow for vendor lock-in. It’s not that having the filesystems open doesn’t help. It’s that MS found a way to hook you in anyway.
Also, you can access (including write) to NTFS filesystems from Linux, I currently do it on Ubuntu and its fine.