“Sun calls ZFS ‘The Last Word in Filesystems.’ but that is hyperbole. ZFS is one of the first widely deployed copy on write FSes. That certainly makes it a tremendous improvement over existing FSes, but pioneers are the ones with arrows in their back. By looking at ZFS’s development it is certainly possible to identify mistakes that they made, and ways to do things better if one were to start from scratch,” Gerbarg writes.
“Apple has a lot of talented filesystem engineers,” Gerbarg writes. “They are certainly capable of doing something comparable to ZFS, at least for their target market. The problem with developing a new modern filesystem is that it generally takes longer than a single OS release cycle. Most companies are really bad at having large teams focused on projects that will not ship in the next version of the project they are working on.”
Gerbarg writes, “This is a particularly acute problem at Apple, which traditionally has done things with very few engineers… I think people don’t appreciate how productive Apple is on a per-engineer basis. The downside of that is that sometimes it is hard to find the resources to do something large and time consuming, particularly when it is not something that most users will notice in a direct sense.”
Gerbarg writes, “The only major downside [with Apple developing a new modern filesystem in-house] is that if Apple is just starting on a next generation FS now it could be a long time before we get our hands on it.”
Full article – recommended – here.
[Attribution: Daring Fireball. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “MacRadDoc” for the heads up.]
That is the longest link I have ever clicked on….
First comment! =)
The full article is a link O_O
Maybe Apple is developing an update to HFS.
I agree that Apple can do a LOT of things better
The only file systems I support are ones that begin with C:\WTF.
Take a look at info on Oracle’s open-sourced BTRFS, and you’ll see why an Oracle-owned Sun might reconsider its dedication to ZFS, as well as another possible alternate route Apple could take for their next filesystem.
So Mac OS 11 (or whatever they’ll call it) could usher in the new file system, and that really would be appropriate! As the world switches, so does Apple. For by that time the Ballmersoft will be no more.
what? MDN is now against ZFS?
Let me suggest that they start with a utility that bridges the gap opened by Snow Leopard’s ignoring filetypes and creator codes and/or files without extensions that launch in the wrong apps or are remapped to ridiculous <strike>filetypes</strike>.
@Towertone… Sometimes, it’s not the size of the link, it’s the URL they send you to!
The ability to have one large storage space you can enlarge when needed with new drives seemlessly is wonderfully useful. I bought a very cheap ububtu-installed house box pc at microcenter, stuck a bunch of drives in it, and now have a three and a half terabyte iTunes volume shared with my macs. Each time the volume gets near full I just add drives. I have some old external drives I use to back up, but if 2tb drives come down in price I’ll just start raiding in the box.
Apple would do logical volume management much more intuitively than linux, but the lvm management utilities aren’t bad.
@Gabriel
“Take a look at info on Oracle’s open-sourced BTRFS, and you’ll see why an Oracle-owned Sun might reconsider its dedication to ZFS …”
Yes, they’re already working on something similar:
“Btrfs … is a … file system … announced by Oracle … Oracle has also,/I. begun work on CRFS (Coherent Remote File System), a network filesystem protocol intended to leverage the Btrfs architecture”
MY ITALICS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs
Oracle acquiring Sun changes everything. Why would Oracle want to maintain two filesystems targeted at the same usage scenarios?
Besides, there are the legal difficulties with NetApp.
@ bioness
“what? MDN is now against ZFS?”
Is it?
It posts Louis Gerbarg’s piece because it’s of interest to Mac users. Why not? That doesn’t mean MDN agrees with all he says. And, anyway, even if it did why would that make them “against ZFS”?
It’s good stuff. However, it’s not, apparently, an ideal fit for Apple. Moreover, <i>Oracle acquiring Sun changes everything — if Oracle drop ZFS, it becomes less attractive to Apple to maintain it on their own. … And then there’s the legal issue with NetApp.
ZFS is a very fine filesystem. But it’s not now necessarily a good option for Apple everything else being as it is.
ZFS wasn’t some bolt-on product Apple would deploy on a future release of OS X. They would have been integrating code to allow for seamless operation.
The work would have started at least ten years ago, so it wouldn’t surprise me if all Apple had to do is begin replacing Sun’s work with their own.
In other words, Apple could be much farther along than we think.
@TowerTone
That’s why it’s recommended
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I never understood how a normal person like myself would benefit from ZFS outside of parity reasons.
Pools sounded like a pain for me on my laptop. I use a lot of external storage, but disconnect and reconnect quite often. Maybe I’m not seeing it, but it always sounded like with ZFS there wasn’t a real way to know what was on one volume vs another. Just a big pool of data that got larger and smaller. So, when disconnected and was on the go I wouldn’t know if I had some of my files on my laptop that I needed. If I ran server farms and has huge numbers of static drive, it sounds fabulous. For me as an individual with portable needs it didn’t sound so hot.
“what? MDN is now against ZFS?”
We are at war with Eastasia. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
i can haz whole article as link?
@MacFinder
“Maybe Apple is developing an update to HFS.”
They did that years ago matey.
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It’s called HFS plus
@urlow
“i can haz whole article as link?”
yes urlow, you ca haz it awl.
ZFS was supposed to much more than “pooled” data. The feature that appealed to me is self-healing data, obviating the need for backups and Time Machine.
The feature that appealed to me is self-healing data, obviating the need for backups and Time Machine.
Um, if the physical hard drive dies, G4Dualie, you’re defintely still going to want backups on a separate drive!
@G4Dualie even with ZFS, you still need a bakup. ZFS will not save you from hardware failure, which in turn is the cause 90% of data loss, if not more.
Has MDN hired an ESL proofreader? Or have typos become the “latest thing“? Or … something else?
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” ZFS is one of the first widely deployed copy on write FSes. “ – and that was difficult to grab, given that it was “within a link”! Still … what does that mean in English? “copy on write”, I can only assume that means to write something in more than one place on the disk – part of the “self-healing” process – but plunked down in the middle of a statement like that, followed by “FSes”, is … confusing is a nice term for it. Even in this crowd where most of the people either already understand it or would understand it with just a few words of explanation.
C’mon, guys, you can do better. If only … please restructure the “link”?
@TowerTone,
Thank you. I thought I was having a severe flashback!
@Mac-nugget,
“@G4Dualie even with ZFS, you still need a bakup”
Don’t you mean “bake-up”?
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