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:2005-07-08
Wouldn't Time Machine profit greatly speed-wise from ZFS
Sure, but just that - speedups (which could probably be hacked around in many ways). I think Apple would want to go beyond of all that - like presenting to applications something else that a path and a stream of bytes.
Member since:2006-07-14
With the same hardware, the only way to achieve ZFS like speeds for snapshots, is to adopt zfs like methods. Waving you hand and using the word hack doesn't change that. Apple probably wants ZFS like features ( for teh speed and reliability) but use it like HFS+ with the psuedo BFS features and legacy Mac-isims.
But that would take a lot of work, and frankly apple doesn't give a crap about painless effortless snapshots, so no ZFS. They'd rather have something that took forever, but was easy to use, than something instantaneous but had a more difficult UI.
Member since:2009-02-19
In my never-humble opinion, I think you pretty much wouldn't want to present application developers with a representation of a file that was much more complicated than a path and a stream of bytes. I doubt most application developers want much more than that from a file; for them, neat new features are just added complexity.
The stream-of-bytes-at-a-path model of a file has lived for so long and changed so little because it's a good model that works very well for its intended purpose. It's not likely that someone's going to come up with some new-and-better metaphor for permanently-stored data on a disk, that's going to supplant the filesystems of today.
Edited 2009-10-26 19:23 UTC
Member since:
2007-06-22
Wouldn't Time Machine profit greatly speed-wise from ZFS if only the changed blocks between two snapshots would have to be sent to the backup disks instead of whole files (which is especially painful with large ones)? I do not own a Time Capsule but I read that larger backups can be quite painful over the air. Plus, the sometimes long calculation of the changes would also disappear.