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Sun exec: ZFS to be default file system in Apples’ Mac OS X Leopard
Wednesday, June 06, 2007 - 03:53 PM EDT

"Perhaps overcome with excitement (and forgetting that Apple doesn't like such pre-emptive disclosures), Sun's Jonathan Schwartz announced today at Sun event in Washington D.C. that Apple would be making ZFS 'the file system' in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard (video link, requires RealPlayer)," longofest reports for MacRumors.

In fact, this week you'll see that Apple is announcing at their Worldwide Developer Conference that ZFS has become the file system in Mac OS 10.

longofest reports, "ZFS has a long list of improvements over Apple's current file system, Journaled HFS+."

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Yes! If true — and it certainly sounds true — this is quite a big deal and qualifies as a major Leopard feature. And Windows will immediately become even more archaic, if that's even possible.

Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris.org describes ZFS:
ZFS is a new kind of filesystem that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to use.

More information here.

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Reader Feedback: ( = registered)

Jun 06, 07 - 03:57 pm Comment from: appleoutsider

Double Yes!

Jun 06, 07 - 03:58 pm Comment from: CDR

first post...

and i guess somebody got to announcing this first... ahead of SJ

Jun 06, 07 - 04:01 pm Comment from: windu

Yesssssss!!!!

Jun 06, 07 - 04:02 pm Comment from: two things

i bet SJ is pissed, if true.

if true, that would qualify for a complete pass on the 4 month delay.

Jun 06, 07 - 04:03 pm Comment from: iMat

FSCKING AMAZING!!!!

Jun 06, 07 - 04:03 pm Comment from: torchwood

Sounds like they are re-writing 10.5 from the ground up!! new everything!!! doing exactly what microsoft said they were going to do!!!

possible marketing campagin!!

'we dont tell you what we might do, we just do!!!'

Jun 06, 07 - 04:05 pm Comment from: Stefano Jobso

We've all been expecting some support. But this is f---ing huge.

This on its own makes Windows irrelevant--even if it wasn't already.

Jun 06, 07 - 04:06 pm Comment from: Mac_ATTY

What in da hell is ZFS and why should we be excited?

Jun 06, 07 - 04:07 pm Comment from: Chris ][

Great, Steve will probably yank the feature now that it's out of the bag!

Jun 06, 07 - 04:07 pm Comment from: Jimbo von Winskinheimer

Torchwood, I don't believe that a new fs would require a code rewrite!

Jun 06, 07 - 04:07 pm Comment from: Hey

What does this mean. I'm not familiar with ZFS or what it does. Everyone seems excited about it though. Could someone give me some hep' in understanding what ZFS will add to Mac OSX?

Thanks

Jun 06, 07 - 04:08 pm Comment from: Roel

Im as excited as anyone, but... what is ZFS?

Jun 06, 07 - 04:09 pm Comment from: Camel Milk Drinker

Can somebody tell me what is so amazing about ZFS? You all seem to be having orgasmic reactions to this rumour or not so rumour!

Jun 06, 07 - 04:09 pm Comment from: j

this must be how timemachine will work well... with the ability to make efficient snapshots

Jun 06, 07 - 04:10 pm Comment from: Ok, I'll Bite

In easy to understand language - What's the significance of the switch from HFS to ZFS?

MDN word is death, as in, please don't beat me to death for asking a question that I should probably already understand my most high "exalted status" leader....

Jun 06, 07 - 04:10 pm Comment from: j

go the the full article, those who don't know what zfs is, and read the two links, one to the homepage of solaris's page and the wikipedia page. they are both informative

Jun 06, 07 - 04:11 pm Comment from: anaknipedro

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zfs

Jun 06, 07 - 04:13 pm Comment from: Roel

Found a link: http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/11983/

Jun 06, 07 - 04:13 pm Comment from: Mac_ATTY

Ok... from Sun:
ZFS is a new kind of filesystem that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to use.

ZFS presents a pooled storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions, provisioning, wasted bandwidth and stranded storage. Thousands of filesystems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it actually needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all filesystems at all times.

All operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. There is no need to fsck(1M) a ZFS filesystem, ever. Every block is checksummed to prevent silent data corruption, and the data is self-healing in replicated (mirrored or RAID) configurations. If one copy is damaged, ZFS will detect it and use another copy to repair it.

ZFS introduces a new data replication model called RAID-Z. It is similar to RAID-5 but uses variable stripe width to eliminate the RAID-5 write hole (stripe corruption due to loss of power between data and parity updates). All RAID-Z writes are full-stripe writes. There's no read-modify-write tax, no write hole, and — the best part — no need for NVRAM in hardware. ZFS loves cheap disks.

But cheap disks can fail, so ZFS provides disk scrubbing. Like ECC memory scrubbing, the idea is to read all data to detect latent errors while they're still correctable. A scrub traverses the entire storage pool to read every copy of every block, validate it against its 256-bit checksum, and repair it if necessary. All this happens while the storage pool is live and in use.

ZFS has a pipelined I/O engine, similar in concept to CPU pipelines. The pipeline operates on I/O dependency graphs and provides scoreboarding, priority, deadline scheduling, out-of-order issue and I/O aggregation. I/O loads that bring other filesystems to their knees are handled with ease by the ZFS I/O pipeline.

Jun 06, 07 - 04:14 pm Comment from: Hey

j: I tried to understand the articles you recommended and it was a lot of techno speak. It didn't help me understand any of the excitment that was generated by the announcment. Can some one "break it down to me brother" so I and others can understand and know what the excitment is about and how OSX will benefit?

Thanks

Jun 06, 07 - 04:16 pm Comment from: Crabapple

For those of you who need to know. And for those of you who need to experience an orgasmic reaction.

ZFS is a file system (a method of arranging data on computer storage) originally created by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris Operating System. It features high capacity, the integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, a novel on-disk structure, lightweight instances, and easy storage pool management. ZFS is implemented as open source software, licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL

ZFS is a 128-bit file system, so it can store 18 billion billion (18.4 × 1018) times more data than current 64-bit systems. The limitations of ZFS are designed to be so large that they will never be encountered in practice.

Enjoy!

Jun 06, 07 - 04:16 pm Comment from: J.C.

Stultified Dumbasses,

RTF "Related articles" that MDN has provided if you're ignorant about ZFS.

One would reasonably assume that's why MDN provides such a list.

ZFS in Leopard is a big, big, big deal!

Jun 06, 07 - 04:17 pm Comment from: anaknipedro

This is what Steve Jobs meant when he said he would change the world:

http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/date/20040925

Jun 06, 07 - 04:18 pm Comment from: Mr. Reeee

Holy Shit! This is GREAT News!

This IS the freaking WOW!

Time Machine is ZFS!
Time Machine is really just a brand name for ZFS!
Really, Leopard is ZFS!

From the OpenSolaris ZFS page:
"ZFS provides unlimited constant-time snapshots and clones. A snapshot is a read-only point-in-time copy of a filesystem, while a clone is a writable copy of a snapshot."

http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/whatis/

Leopard ZFS will flip old snapping turtle Vista on it's back and hold it down while it slowly suffocates.

Jun 06, 07 - 04:19 pm Comment from: Reality Check

Makes sod all difference to 99% of us. Great if you're running a data server though.

Jun 06, 07 - 04:21 pm Comment from: Aldebaran

Good Lord! This is already a footnote reference on the Wikipedia page for ZFS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zfs#_note-18

(Footnote #20)

Jun 06, 07 - 04:22 pm Comment from: Ragu

@Mac_ATTY

Thanks dude

Jun 06, 07 - 04:23 pm Comment from: Hey

Thanks Crabapple,
That was very helpful.

And to J.C.
You respond like a Windows IT guy. (specifically Steve Ballmer) I'm glad you're not a person called upon to teach computers to new users when asked!

At least a REAL mac person will be willing to SIMPLY show the benefits of a new MAC technology (example: Steve Jobs at his keynote).

I'm glad Steve J didn't ask you to represent and introduce anything new from Apple at a keynote with your response to people wanting to know more about new MAC technologies! Sheesh!!

Jun 06, 07 - 04:23 pm Comment from: Smackleclam MacSmugster

And from wikipedia on Leopard:
"In mid-December 2006, a French developer using a pre-release version of Leopard spotted support for Sun's ZFS."

Jun 06, 07 - 04:25 pm Comment from: Bizarro Ballmer

Where's the icon of a waving hand over ones head...whooosh.

Jun 06, 07 - 04:25 pm Comment from: bob

This is actually great even for a desktop. It's blazing fast, resilient to errors, and can grow a partition by plugging in a new disk...

Jun 06, 07 - 04:25 pm Comment from: Semaphore Jones

FFS!

Can somebody explain what ZFS means from a user experience point-of-view and not from a technobabble point-of-view.

Yes, it's innovative.
Yes, it files data differently.

How does this affect my computing experience from a user perspective? What does it allow me to do? What will it allow OSX to do over Vista?

BTW - the links everyone are posting don't answer any of those questions.

Jun 06, 07 - 04:26 pm Comment from: ?

ZFS: maximum filename size = 255 bytes?

this seems like a step backwards from OS X's HFS+ = 255 UTF-16 characters

someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Jun 06, 07 - 04:29 pm Comment from: Crabapple

@ Reality Check.

Just imagine, No more defragmenting, No more loosing of data because you just had a powercut and you did not save your work. No more corrupt hard disc because you do not keep your Mac running continously from the day you bought it.

But there is a drawback for those who like to surf Porn sites and sites that could get you into trouble at work because all that data will be kept just as secure and easily recoverable via Time machine of course!!!

Your best bet will be to hand over your old Mac for recycling to Apple because they will grind down the hard disc before recycling it.

Jun 06, 07 - 04:29 pm Comment from: me

Let's hope for a complete renovation of the FINDER!

Jun 06, 07 - 04:30 pm Comment from: realnbk

Steve will not be mad
weknew it could happen since august of last year

Jun 06, 07 - 04:32 pm Comment from: me

Why can't I just MAP A NETWORK DRIVE??

Jun 06, 07 - 04:33 pm Comment from: PM

If this is really true......Leopard's file system will be extremely advanced extremely efficient as well . ZFS tops HFS+, and literally kicks the sh*t out of NTFS over, and over, and over again.

Jun 06, 07 - 04:34 pm Comment from: anaknipedro

With all the snapshots and error checking and error correction, wouldn't this effect battery life on portables?

Jun 06, 07 - 04:37 pm Comment from: deleted

@Reality Check

Let's see: You mean faster access to your file, no file size limit, same access to a small directory as to the largest directory you can even imagine, practically infinite number of metadata to attach to a file for searching capabilities and organization, no data corruption (recovery and repair on the fly), did I mention faster access to the data (time not dependent on the amount of files, data you have on disk), fastest operations for the OS and for user space by using an intelligent cache method instead of traditional virtual memory (begone the pre-binding or pre-fetching tricks), no spinning wheels ever.
And this just to look at the immediately visibly stuff.

Yes, all above makes sod all difference to 99% of us. Yeah, right.

Oh I see, you meant 0.99% of us.

Jun 06, 07 - 04:42 pm Comment from: deleted

@anak

actually, ZFS providing a much more optimized I/O and disk operation the battery life time should actually improve quite significantly.

Jun 06, 07 - 04:46 pm Comment from: Best one yet

MDN: "And Windows will immediately become even more archaic, if that's even possible.".

Hahahahahaha.

Jun 06, 07 - 04:50 pm Comment from: me

looks like leopard is going to focus on speed... First llvm then zfs... nice.....

Jun 06, 07 - 04:54 pm Comment from: ***

You mean nobody out there tried this before? Not even homebrewers?

Jun 06, 07 - 05:02 pm Comment from: ZFS Rules!

Reality Check isn't interested, he would rather go FSCK himself, and without ZFS he will have too! LOL
LOL

Jun 06, 07 - 05:11 pm Comment from: M.A.D.

What will an updgrade from Tiger to Leopard be like with such an overhauled file system?

anyone?

Jun 06, 07 - 05:16 pm Comment from: mike

if true, that would qualify for a complete pass on the 4 month delay.
-

Dude. OS X had to be ported to the iPhone, gutted and reconfigured, that's why they took engineers off Leopard for Mac... Doesn't THAT qualify for a pass?

Furthermore, we already know Leopard is done and feature complete and the extra months are for bug testing... Doesn't THAT qualify for a pass? Shit!

Jun 06, 07 - 05:25 pm Comment from: Crabapple

ZFS = Zettabyte File System.

Jun 06, 07 - 05:42 pm Comment from: gmaff

Do I need to worry about it working with PPC or my current harddrive? Is this something that is going to be limited to newer machines?????

Jun 06, 07 - 05:48 pm Comment from: SteveJack

d sdb sgdfb

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