Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 23rd Oct 2009 21:13 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
John Siracusa, the Mac OS X guru who writes those insanely detailed and well-written Mac OS X reviews for Ars Technica, once told a story about the evolution of the HFS+ file system in Mac OS X - he said it was a struggle between the Mac guys who wanted the features found in BeOS' BFS, and the NEXT guys who didn't really like these features. In the end, the Mac guys won, and over the course of six years, Mac OS X reached feature parity - and a little more - with the BeOS (at the FS level).
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Member since:
2006-01-19
And what you experienced has nothing to do with the HFS+ file system at all. We're talking about ZFS and the memory used to improve performance. It is a known side effect of the file system design - ZFS was never designed to be used in an environment where memory is at a premium. "
Of course not. Why would you think that I connect OSX memory usage with HFS+ ? My point is that leopard as deployed on desktop class platforms is _already_ a memory hog in my experience. Thus it's hard for me to speculate on ZFS not making the cut because it _might_ be a memory hog on OSX.
Why should a next gen apple FS be required to span all platforms? This is as likely as not to lead to undesirable compromises on both ends, even if it is cheaper. I say horses for courses. (do we buy apple products because they are cheap or cheap to design? does apple pass cheap design costs on to us?).
UFS was a walking disaster area when one considers the litany of issues people had with it. Apple is eventually going to replace it with something that will scale from embedded to servers so that they don't have to have duplication and thus unneeded extra cost. HAMMER will do what you need - are there features missing? of course but HAMMER is in continuous development with the short comings being addressed.
Unlike ZFS, HAMMER provides everything plus a lower memory foot print - I'd say that is a pretty good alternative to ZFS. "
Hammer might be great on OS X except for the fact that it does not currently exist on OS X. I wouldn't bet on that changing either, but would be pleased to be proven wrong.