An Apple official on Monday said Sun’s open-source file system would not be in the next version of the Mac operating system, contradicting statements made last week by Sun’s chief executive. During an interview with InformationWeek, Brian Croll, senior director of product marketing for the Mac OS, said, “ZFS is not happening,” when asked whether Sun’s Zettabyte File System would be in Leopard. Instead, Leopard would use Apple’s current hierarchical file system, called HFS+. The Apple file system was first introduced in 1998 in Mac OS 8.0.
i posted this some time ago here.
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=18074&comment_id=247194
guess it is front page worthy. I honestly think though, that ZFS will be in there. even if its not the default or bootable. easrly developer releases did have ZFS as a formating option. I hope tehy leave at least that.
Apple seriously needs to update HFS+ to something more modern.
Why? Are you missing something using it? It’s not like it’s broken…
“””
Why? Are you missing something using it? It’s not like it’s broken…
“””
I think they are in the same boat as the rest of us. Journalled metadata, 4 billion files per directory, 16TiB maximum file size, and 16TiB maximum volume size is plenty for most folks today. And orginzations who need more have other options.
But in a few years… we’ll all need something.
Well, except for ZFS. Sun got tired of the bit size merry-go-round, and with its 128 bit allowances, should be good for another 150 years or so, assuming a doubling of requirements every 1.5 years.
I can’t blame them, really.
It doesn’t have the sophistication of ZFS when it comes to pooling drives together. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettabyte_File_System#Storage_pools
ZFS is particularly important for people who deal with large files. Since a high percentage of computer graphic designers use Macs, ZFS is very beneficial. Also, Apple has attracted video editing professionals, and ZFS fits perfectly with this.
Its as broken as Fat32 was to Windows – it is incredibly precious, and speed wise, it is terrible when compared to ZFS – using it right now on my laptop. What ZFS offers not only brings it up to NTFS standards, but exceeds it in term so performance and reliability.
Now, HFS+ isn’t going to be totally thrown out, they’ll probably still keep using it for their iPod, but I don’t seem them using it anything more than just that.
It Completely blows NTFS away!
What benchmark did you run to determine that.
NTFS reliable? LOL! You must be kidding me.
HFS+ is fine for the default file system for the client. 99% of people out there dont and wont know what the heck ZFS is and what you can do with it.
For us %2 or so who do know can use ZFS on non bootable drives etc. And I am sure there will be better support for ZFS in Leopard server then in Leopard client.
I think it will be really good for large client file systems. (People who have a LOT of music, MP3’s and have external drives) And it’s good for large file systems for databases etc. But ZFS doesn’t support quotas and a lot of file permission features you find in other file systems.
So on file servers it sucks. 🙁
Um…ZFS supports per-filesystem quotas and NFSv4 ACLs last I checked. Where’s the problem?
ZFS does not support per user or per group quota.
So for users you would have to make their own filesystem for each user to control space. A BIG headache. And plus not easy to adjust on the fly like normal quotas.
And for groups you have nothing?? No ability to quota by group at all.
So as a file server in an enterprise I would choose Windows or Linux (XFS or JFS) for that (Or Solaris with it’s default file system)
And you are right about the ACL’s. I have been reading in the open solaris fourms that the ACL implimentation could be better and has some issues.
(Looking for links to share)
Also does anyone know if ZFS is Journaling?
Also, XFS is pretty sweet, it can support Volumes up to 8 EIB (ZFS supports 16) That is what I tend to use on Linux if not Jfs.
First you state the HFS+ is adequate and then you ask if ZFS is journaling. I think you could do with some extra reading (I don’t really want to be insulting: here’s a great source from the guy who did BFS for BeOS about the internal structures and merits of several commercial FSes: http://www.letterp.com/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf. Page 37 covers HFS(+)).
In particular, HFS and HFS+ have a very radically different filesystem structure from every other filesystem. The only thing that comes close in structure is ReiserFS (not sure how the B-tree differs between 3 and 4, but I’m basing my words on what I’ve read about 4). HFS was perfect for the early macintosh, which was at the beginning of the desktop computer, but it has serious problems on a modern multi-program and multi-user system. Both the original and the plus versions have a complicated metadata structure that cannot be safely accessed and updated in parallel, and which does not make the most efficient use of the disk and the cache (after all, the early PCs would not waste much memory on something unnecessary like a disk cache). HFS+ added features, like journalling (which theoretically should alleviate some of the bottlenecks, depending on how it’s implemented), but the complicated catalog structure is still there.
The referenced book does not include anything about ZFS-style systems because they did not really exist when BFS was being written. ZFS does not need journalling because the filesystem is basically just a journal itself. It’s a new (and high-performance) implementation of the log-structured filesystem concept. Wikipedia has a good article on this type of FS. Doing this efficiently requires a lot of RAM for a buffer cache. This is true for NTFS as well, which is why we saw very different FSes like FAT32 and HFS in the early days.
ZFS is really a good way forward. But I don’t think even OpenSolaris yet boots off of ZFS, so it’d be highly surprising if Apple beats them to that punch. And frankly, FS performance is not _that_ critical to desktop workstation users. ZFS might be good if Apple were to aim more solidly at the server market. Otherwise it’s purely a marketing gimmick (that requires a lot of dev work), just to promote “the world’s most advanced OS.” To go for the server market, they’d probably want to just scrap the rest of the kernel, though, because XNU is not the greatest design, as far as I have read.
Bootable ZFS has been available since B62 – pool/data set creation etc has not been added to the installer, but apparently it will be added to the installer that is being developed and gradually moved into the future builds.
Considering that Apple do not rely on GRUB for their booting, it’ll be up to Apple to implement the necessary components in their bootstrap programme – so where Apple is, its unknown; but given that Sun has already made it possible, I would be surprised if we don’t see it in a future or even a future build of MacOS X Leopard on future machines released.
I stand corrected. I should have checked up on this, because it would have been an easy thing to google for.
What I really hope for is ZFS coming to Windows. Booting off it is not important, but it’d be great to have for data disks.
Its all good; its a bit of searching around OpenSolaris to get information – unfortunately it isn’t exactly laid out in a user friendly manner (especially for those outside the project).
Unfortunately I don’t see that happening – although, if we are going to have a dream, I wouldn’t mind Microsoft basing a new operating system on Solaris 🙂
Why would you want to do that??
NT is already a pretty good OS at the kernel level with some equivalents to the Solaris features. I will not make ludicrous claims by saying that Windows has everything that Solaris has in terms of server features (even if ZFS were to be ported), but most of the resource-management and network-serving capabilities are already in NT. And NT has a proven track-record as a desktop kernel.
What would building off of Solaris give Windows users? Are zones worth that much?
Creating filesystems in ZFS is almost analogous to creating a directory. So creating a filesystem out of the ZFS pool really isn’t a problem.
If you want to quota by group then you should look here http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/faq/;jsessionid=97CB9.
AFAIK, ZFS isn’t journaling in the normal sense, but it does ensure on disk consistency in the same way.
Excuse me, I never said it was reliable – stop putting words in my mouth. Compared to Fat32, it is very reliable. From my use of it with Windows 2000/XP/Vista, I never found it unreliable.
Considering that ZFS will yield a massive improvement in performance, improved RAID capabilities for those who purchase Mac Pro’s, you seem to make the same bigoted statements that all anti-Mac people make – that those who use Mac are obviously clueless morons.
May I suggest you do some reading about ZFS, and then you’ll realise that it doesn’t just benefit technology boffins but Apple’s high end customers as well.
Databases are generally done on raw devices – no file systems required. As for ZFS and lacking – what is it lacking? again, look at the information about ZFS; ZFS is different to any other file system – it has new ways of doing old things. Read, Read and Read, then come back and come to a conclusion.
“What ZFS offers not only brings it up to NTFS standards, but exceeds it in term so performance and reliability.”
What you imply here is that NTFS is high standard. And that ZFS and other file systems had to be brought up to the NTFS standard and that ZFS is the only one that passes NTFS standards. And the HFS+ doesn’t meet that standard.
Just like you I have used Mac OS X since the beginning and I have never had a problem with HFS+. I have never had to worry about chkdsk, or defrag problems. NEVER had a problem with HFS+ partitions showing up as needed to be reformatted out of the blue (Like I have had with NTFS partitions on 2000 and XP)
Also if you READ what I wrote I said that “HFS+ is fine for the default file system for the client. 99% of people out there dont and wont know what the heck ZFS is and what you can do with it.” I also said “For us %2 or so who do know can use ZFS on non bootable drives etc. And I am sure there will be better support for ZFS in Leopard server then in Leopard client. ”
Since MacPro users make up a small amount of Mac users my 2% statement covers them. On top of that I am sure it wont kill people to have the boot drive not part of the RAID. Most of the time when you make a machine with Raid you don’t include your boot drive in the raid configuration.
Also “Databases are generally done on raw devices – no file systems required.” Yes on high end databases this is true. But most companies and orgs don’t run all or even most of their databases on high end machines or storage arrays. I work for the federal government and for some of our databases we run them on Net App or EMC storage arrays. But most of the databases are run on AIX or Windows servers using standard NTFS or JFS partitions.
Anyway duh, Apple knows that ZFS will help it’s high end customers! But their customer base is made up more of Windows switchers, Ipod users and Mac fans then of High End customers. So Apple wants to make sure what they put out is reliable to the standard that they are known for.
And sorry to say but ZFS is not reliable and is very slow on boot devices. Simple as that.
“you seem to make the same bigoted statements that all anti-Mac people make – that those who use Mac are obviously clueless morons.” And Duh, I am not Anti Mac at all, I have made NO Anti Mac statements. My statements are about the reliability of ZFS for the regular user! Which has nothing to do with Apple or the Mac. And I am actually touting the reliability of HFS+ which is all about the Mac and Apple. So YOU might want to read first.
@samad:
> Apple seriously needs to update HFS+ to something more modern
Cause it is missing what? (honest question, not ranting)
Edit: OK, read everything. I missed it since useful explanations were not referenced as a reply to samad’s post, so I asked right away. Sorry…
Edited 2007-06-13 00:31
It seems to be a problem across the board. Apple, Microsoft and Linux are all using oldish filesystems, thus preventing the implementation of interesting new features. Heck, SUSE even reverted to ext3 as the default!
Mr. Schwartz shouldnt have openned his mouth… ATI could have taught him that lesson.
Anyway…. whats wrong with tried and true? HFS+ has worked this long, im sure it will work just fine.
Yeah…Mr. Schwartz shouldn’t have said anything. Steve Jobs likes it when he is the one to give information out.
Well, thats Steve Jobs problem. He has a serious issue if he has to be the one to state good news every single time, and try to take all the credit for it. Why can’t Sun get credit for their accomplishment?
The important thing is who is going to suffer from this decision, and the most likely person will be Apple users, stuck with HFS+ for at least another year. I don’t get why Steve Jobs needs to one to state all news, regardless of who else it affects. Cingular usually announces when they are introducing a new phone, etc, stuff like that.
Usually when one company or person accomplished something, they don’t always have to let someone else announce it and try to take all the credit for it.
Edited 2007-06-12 20:53
Kind of like Al Gore’s internet claims he made years ago… LOL.
It seems Steve Jobs has a problem with being honest at times.
Anyway I was hoping ZFS would be in Leopard. I’ve been holding off on buying a Mac because of Leopard. Hopefully the new iMacs will be a major improvement over the current lot.
You know this has been debunked, right?
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
> Yeah…Mr. Schwartz shouldn’t have said anything. Steve Jobs likes it when he is the one to give information out.
Nobody scoops THE Steve
Edited 2007-06-12 21:35
“””
Nobody scoops THE Steve
“””
Is that the official 4Front Technologies position on the matter?
I only ask because you post as 4front, with a home page listed as http://www.opensound.com
So he can’t be human and make a joke?
“””
So he can’t be human and make a joke?
“””
Not at all. Think of my post as a reminder to the “4front” user that posting frivolously from what looks to be the official 4Front Technologies spokes-account here on OSNews might be taken in a way which he may not desire. Some might take offense to light hearted remarks without him realizing it.
And while I, personally, am not offended by 4Front suggesting that Apple is witholding ZFS from their users simply out of spite for Schwartz’ remarks, some people might be offended by such.
So if the user “Bill Gates” posts a comment, I should think its Bill himself. Stop reading to much into the names people use.
“””
So if the user “Bill Gates” posts a comment, I should think its Bill himself.
“””
Are you claiming that he is not really Dev Mazumdar, cofounder of 4Front Technologies?
From his user page:
Real name: Dev Mazumdar
Edited 2007-06-13 17:47
No, I’m saying you can’t believe everything you read online. I have no clue who the person is, nor do I care. I just hope I point out that even though his username and Real name say he is someone from somewhere, it can be fake and not to believe that people are honest around here. Otherwise, I have a bridge to sell you.
I don’t know if HFS+ is the problem, or the lack of good file system utilities.
I have personally helped many customers who needed DiskWarrior to recover from HFS+ problems (When recoverable).
Having ZFS in Leopard would have been the most valuable new feature to me.
HFS and HFS+ is an very unstable and error prone filesystem compared to many others.
Just look at how easy it is to totally mess up the filesystem if the computer OS crasches.
Even when using their journaling system it is not that good.
The very good thing about HFS+ is that it is an quite speedy FS.
it looks like apple is being very sneaky about leopard. first ea and now this.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/06/11/eas_new_mac_games_wil…
Don’t underestimate EA.
You mean don’t overestimate EA?
i’m talking about the fact that ea’s games will use cider and won’t be native ports. i thought it was kinda disappointing.
I don’t think they recut all those preview disks because of schwartz.
people are on both sides of the fence. some people really want ZFS others are fiune with what they have. the truth is currently HFS+ does its job well enough. but look at it like this. HFS+ is like an older honda. sure its stable and u can keep upgrading it to an extent, but after a while u run out of room to upgrade due to limitations of the original design. this is when recreating it better frmo the ground up is more efective then to keep swapping parts out and putting on new paint.
ZFS is jsut that shinny new car with lots of room to expant. at the end of the day it has more feautres and benefits and safety. especialy in the server field. the fact is it would be a great addition to the mac platform. hopefull it gets here soon. untill then, well it could be worse. i mean when was the last BSoD you saw because of HFS+
“An Apple spokesman contacted InformationWeek with a correction, which they ran as a comment on their original story: What Apple meant to say was, “ZFS would be available as a limited option, but not as the default file system.”
I hope ZFS support will not be like UFS “support” in Tiger and its predecessors. While UFS was “supported”, many applications just failed to install or run correctly due to the way HFS+ is required for handling the resource forks.
“I hope ZFS support will not be like UFS “support” in Tiger and its predecessors.”
I think it will be so in Leopard.
Maybe in Mac OS X 10.6 “Next Big Cat” things will change.
Anyway, I have a little thing to say to Schwartz:
SHUT UP NEXT TIME, WTF!!!
If Jobs wants to cut his nose off to spite his face so what. Sun developed the worlds best filesystem with their own engineering talent, made it available via an OSS license, even assisted Apple port it and somehow Schwartz is at fault?
Assuming Jobs really was childish enough to pull the biggest feature of Leopard I don’t see how this harms Sun. Seems like everyone is talking about Sun’s ZFS despite the fact their was not mention of it in the keynote. All Jobs has accomplished is denying his customers a superior filesystem and making himself appear to have the maturity of an adolescent. No offense to any mature teens out there.
Actually, you give Schmidt too much credit. Jobs doesn’t determine when a filesystem is ready to for primetime. Bertrand would be the one to determine with his team whether it’s ready to take over as the filesystem of choice.
No one has bothered to do an Engineering Feasibility study on the state of ZFS and how it would integrate with the way OS X Leopard interacts from the kernel to the Window Server.
All else is nothing but a bunch of bitchy hens gossiping.
“and somehow Schwartz is at fault? ”
Yeah, how could it *possible* be his own fault for talking out of is ass and making claims that aren’t true?
A filesystem isn’t something you can just yank out of the OS at a whim. If they were planning on supporting ZFS, the code should already be in place.
However, I’m not getting my hopes up. I’ve wanted to use UFS natively instead of HFS+ since Jaguar. I mean, a filesystem that doesn’t have capitalization (!!). However, my efforts have always been thwarted since UFS apparently doesn’t handle resource forks in the same way as HFS+. While most applications would work, there are a significant number that fail.
The impression I get is that HFS+ is so ingrained into OS X that if ZFS is truly supported, it will be no small feat to have this feature pulled. It is way more likely that Schwartz just got over excited when he heard that ZFS was going to be “supported”.
>….cut his nose off to spite…
No, that is wrongly quoted: should be, “cut his nose off despite his face”.. i.e. “even though it would make his face look bad”.
Anyway, I have a little thing to say to Schwartz:
SHUT UP NEXT TIME, WTF!!!
What exactly would Schwartz and/or Sun win by following your advice of “SHUT UP NEXT TIME, WTF!!!” The whole industry doesn’t revolve around stroking Steve’s ego you know.
“What exactly would Schwartz and/or Sun win by following your advice of “SHUT UP NEXT TIME, WTF!!!”
Avoid making embarrassing and incorrect statements to the press?
Direct source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml;?articleID=19…
(PS: Called!)
I haven’t had any issues with HFS+ in Mac OS X…in pre-X days I did some recoveries with DiskWarrior, etc., but no biggie.
However, I thought that ZFS wasn’t ready to be bootable. There is a project underway to accomplish this, but it may not be ready for ‘prime time’. Also i think you can’t implement per-user disk quotas while using ZFS.
Maybe it is wise not including it yet, and again, I don’t mind having HFS+ for another release.
To the first point, bootable ZFS has been in OpenSolaris/Nevada since around snv_62 or so, though I believe there’re currently some restrictions on how complex a setup the root pool can have (Edit: by the looks of it, the main restriction at the moment is that the root pool cannot be using RAIDZ in either parity configuration. Mirroring is allowed however). What isn’t there yet, but is almost ready, is support for it in Solaris’s installer. This isn’t currently available in a released version of Solaris Express, but should be soon. As for quotas, in ZFS those are implemented as a filesystem attribute, which is to say they can indeed be done by simply making each user’s home dir its own filesystem in the pool and then setting the quota on that. This also has the advantage of letting you set attributes such as compression, encryption (once that’s ready) and ditto copies of files on a per user basis.
Edited 2007-06-12 21:38 UTC
Why would Apple release ZFS for OS X Leopard when Solaris has still got to work out some kinks, not to mention ZFS has to satisfy the needs Apple has for their operating system and how it interacts with a filesystem?
Apple has dtrace yet dtrace was well-QA’d before Apple ported it.
ZFS works just fine, the caveat is simply that until recently it couldn’t be used as the filesystem for the boot partition. The problem with using any FS as the boot filesystem is that your boot loader has to have enough intelligence to be able to parse the filesystem in order to find and load the kernel. With ZFS this becomes quite tricky since the blocks that comprise the kernel may well be distributed across several disks in a pool. Consequently the loader has to not only be able to parse the block tree on the primary disk, it must also be able to parse the pool configuration and reconstruct the pool from all the other disks that comprise it before it can even attempt to locate the kernel. This is especially tricky when considering that on a conventional x86 machine this essentially means you have to replicate a good chunk of ZFS’s code without all the nice services the kernel gives you. This may actually be easier for Apple since their x86 systems use EFI only, which could possibly be easier to write a ZFS loader in (disclaimer: I am speculating here since I don’t know EFI in great detail at this point). So it would be possible for Apple to beat Sun to the punch on boot support in theory.
Edited 2007-06-13 04:53 UTC
I see..
Thanks for the info.
There could be some truth to this suggestion; AFAIK ZFS isn’t bootable in FreeBSD yet either, so maybe they haven’t been able to add boot support to OS X in time for the October release (I imagine they’ve already hit feature freeze in Leopard).
So, a smallish HFS+Journalled for boot/swap, and the rest ZFS for great justice. 😉
I swear, my love of hard drives and filesystems is purely Platonic.
– chrish
It’s not like HFS+ is a hugely bad filesystem.
It’s served well for a long time, and it’s stable, I’ve never had any issues with it personally.
On occasion something will go weird and a quick reboot into Single User mode and fsck it and it comes fine.
If it’s a more serious problem fsck_hfs can also help. Worst case scenario you use Diskwarrior, which does a brilliant job might I add.
Just because it’s “O so old” doesn’t mean it’s a bad filesystem.
ZFS would sure be sweet, but if it comes in 10.6, so be it, at least they have some more time to work through any issues it might be having.
I’m not sure the fascination to complain about everything is.
People seem to be a bunch of sheep these days.
HFS+ was introduced in Mac OS 8.1, not 8.0.
HFS+ also gained journaling as an option in Mac OS X 10.2.2, and that was enabled by default in 10.3.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plus#History
In reading the comments, I think most people fail to realize the real importance of ZFS. While the extra disk space is nice, we are at least 5 years away from running into the current limitation of even the most primitive file systems. The true value of ZFS lies elsewhere. The true value is the integrated Volume Manager, RAID, and Error Correction. You now will be able to easily backup your file system, take snapshots, expand your volume, migrate to a bigger drive, etc. ZFS does all the hard work and Apple just needs to slap on an easy-yet-powerful GUI on top. The best thing about it is that it does not suck up much resources for all this because it was built from the ground up to do so rather than hacking bits and pieces together (*cough* Windows XP Background Snapshot Utility *cough*)
“Windows XP Background Snapshot Utility”
Where is this entity? I have not been able to find it on any of the 100 or so XP boxes at work, or on google either.
Perhaps you are talking about Volume Shadow Copy? That uses very little resources, and was built from scratch.
Maybe you meant System Restore? That does not take disk snapshots, it takes system state snapshots and does not touch user data, and only uses disk space, that is configurable.
hmmmm…I can’t figure out what you are referencing.
Hmm. ZFS is the file system that supports device and field sizes, etc., so large that it’ll take years and years at current growth rates to exceed?
This is wild supposition on my part. The only reason I can see Apple adopting ZFS is for OSX server. HFS+ works fine for the 3TB or so that you can stuff into a Mac Pro. I certainly haven’t heard of any problems.
I think ZFS as a technology is too obscure to create the kind of buzz Apple likes to generate around the WWDC. It’s a backend, workhorse technology. I just can’t see Steve Jobs, on stage at the WWDC, demonstrating how to create a half-petabyte storage pool. Exciting to me, yes, to the general public, not so much. Graphics and animations are something anyone can take a look at and understand what is happening.
If Apple wants to get serious as a server platform provider ZFS is a must, as well as other best-of-breed technologies. In all seriousness, I don’t think Apple has it’s server business figured out. There aren’t many niches that the Xserve and OSX server really fit into. There is the very large HPCC at a university which I recall hearing about. That’s a good niche, but which could just have easily been filled with Linux boxes. Running Quartermaster for rendering After Effects, or Final Cut is a good purpose.
But as a file server, what does the Xserve have to offer that a cheap SAN doesn’t.
Edited 2007-06-13 02:24
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t this a DEVELOPERS conference? ZFS is rather interesting to developers from what I’ve seen, not necessarily as much to users, but this would make a whole lot more sense then mentioning a new Finder look, at that point in time. Of course its Steve Jobs, so then again, what am I saying… its actually a “Development conference”, showing off the latest new features of OS X only for end users.
The latest update to the story is that ZFS will be included in Leopard, it just won’t be the file system used by default. Looks like a custom install for me when it comes out. 🙂
And the link would be: http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9728660-7.html?tag=blog.2
Edited 2007-06-13 02:37
well, looking at the “new features” of leopard, it seems that zfs cuold be the only one to update.
I will stay with tiger (until solaris ppc will be ready)
OK, so I seem to have a ‘mod-me-down-do Death Wish’ of late, but here I go again….
I think Apple may find that its touted ‘Slacker cool’ image may come round to bite back – first the postponement of Leopard, then the iTunes non-DRM personal DRM issue (has the company yet officially reacted to quite widely expressed unease about that?), now no ZFS – yes, all a bit slack, really.
Finally, though, which may be worse, we have gone from ‘I’m a Mac, I’m a PC’ to ‘I am a Mac, but on a PC’ with Safari for Windows – anyone else feel that the whole distinction between these two companies, Windows and Apple, is starting to dissolve?
I love my G4 to bits but PPC Linux never seemed so attractive, for all that some may have written it off.
I dont know if it’s been posted yet but here is an update to teh ZFS issue
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=JL…