ZFS Project Page at MacOSForge

What could this mean? :confused:

By God, by apple, or by the community, we will have our ZFS in Leopard. :)
By the time 10.5.5 is being sent out to users ZFS should at least be in full force use.

By God, by apple, or by the community, we will have our ZFS in Leopard. :)
By the time 10.5.5 is being sent out to users ZFS should at least be in full force use.

My words exactly. ;)

That doesn't look good on Apple for waiting on ZFS. Everyone knocked Vista for waiting for WinFS and Apple did the same thing on ZFS. I sure hope it's worth the wait.

By God, by apple, or by the community, we will have our ZFS in Leopard. :)
By the time 10.5.5 is being sent out to users ZFS should at least be in full force use.

i sure hope so :cool:

That doesn't look good on Apple for waiting on ZFS. Everyone knocked Vista for waiting for WinFS and Apple did the same thing on ZFS. I sure hope it's worth the wait.

Apple has NEVER trumpeted ZFS as a feature of Leopard, they've just quietly implemented portions of it in the background. Any ZFS "announcement" we've seen has been from someone other than Apple.

Microsoft has consistently talked about a so-called "Object File System" since the '90s, and failed to deliver. WinFS was only supposed to be a subset of this Object File System, and even it was removed from Vista, with the promise it will be available at some later date.

Also, ZFS actually exists, even if only on other platforms. WinFS is still nothing other than vaporware.

That doesn't look good on Apple for waiting on ZFS. Everyone knocked Vista for waiting for WinFS and Apple did the same thing on ZFS. I sure hope it's worth the wait.

The main issue with ZFS, IMHO, is the user-side implementation. The back end on disk structure and I/O handling is fantastic and so worth it. However, it dramatically changes how one manages your files. There is no hierarchy as does HPFS and NTFS/FAT/FAT32 etc. Very different.. Geeks will get it.. pseudo-geeks and geek wanna-bees wont. Average end users, no way. Well, at least initially.

It will make the entire system much faster and much less likely to have disk corruption due to power failure etc.

Everything lives as a pool. Take a look at the Wikipedia entry for details or if you like a little pain, search Sun's page.

The main issue with ZFS, IMHO, is the user-side implementation. The back end on disk structure and I/O handling is fantastic and so worth it. However, it dramatically changes how one manages your files. There is no hierarchy as does HPFS and NTFS/FAT/FAT32 etc. Very different.. Geeks will get it.. pseudo-geeks and geek wanna-bees wont. Average end users, no way. Well, at least initially.

It will make the entire system much faster and much less likely to have disk corruption due to power failure etc.

Everything lives as a pool. Take a look at the Wikipedia entry for details or if you like a little pain, search Sun's page.

Not sure what you mean by no hierarchy, its really no different for end-users. The one difference would be that drives would be put into pools, but that's not going to mean much for most end-users. Most Apple users (especially the non-technical ones) are laptop users anyway, so that won't matter. It's the other features, like snapshots and checksums that're going to make a difference to these users (an updated time machine utilizing snapshots will absolutely rock).

ZFS won't really make the system faster (it actually has the potential to slow things down, due to all the checksumming), however you're right about less corruption. Even more important, it virtually eliminates silent corruption issues you might find on a failing disk.

Apple has NEVER trumpeted ZFS as a feature of Leopard, they've just quietly implemented portions of it in the background. Any ZFS "announcement" we've seen has been from someone other than Apple.

Exactly. Or almost so. Actually, there were strange conflicting rebuttals coming from different people in Apple after Schwartz's announcement. When the dust finally settled, Jobs did finally announce read-only ZFS.

Microsoft has consistently talked about a so-called "Object File System" since the '90s, and failed to deliver. WinFS was only supposed to be a subset of this Object File System, and even it was removed from Vista, with the promise it will be available at some later date.

Is this true? When I read the WinFS announcement from Microsoft, it wasn't just delayed - it was scuttled completely. I haven't read anything different since, but it is possible that it is still kicking around out there.

Also, ZFS actually exists, even if only on other platforms. WinFS is still nothing other than vaporware.

But they are targeting very different audiences. ZFS is a high performance RAID-Z filesystem that handles advanced features like snapshots, resource pooling, LARGE file and filesystem sizes, seamlessly. But it is still very much a tradition file system - it sees everything as a stream of bits.

WinFS was meant to be more of an Object Store - a filesystem that "knew" what was being stored in it and could optimize storage, search, backup, and retrieval for the types of data being stored. It was touting features like extensible meta-data, and SQL-like search for everything stored in the system.

Of course WinFS never materialized (probably never will) but what we all would really like is the ideas touted by Microsoft in WinFS implemented on top of something real like ZFS.

Not sure what you mean by no hierarchy, its really no different for end-users. The one difference would be that drives would be put into pools, but that's not going to mean much for most end-users. Most Apple users (especially the non-technical ones) are laptop users anyway, so that won't matter. It's the other features, like snapshots and checksums that're going to make a difference to these users (an updated time machine utilizing snapshots will absolutely rock).

ZFS won't really make the system faster (it actually has the potential to slow things down, due to all the checksumming), however you're right about less corruption. Even more important, it virtually eliminates silent corruption issues you might find on a failing disk.

My understanding, and I could be wrong - I often am, the ZFS allows for scheduled writes. Meaning, if an application doesn't have focus or primary focus, it's write cycles to the hard drive are queued and the primary application is given priority. This would definitely improve I/O if you are gaming /photoshoping as you listen to iTunes etc.

Hierarchical - I ment that since everything can be it's own pool of space on the HD - it doesn't matter that much if all of your files are on the root of the drive. Root of a drive is completely arbitrary.

I am excited about it though. I think the cache on HD will get larger as a result.. maybe. :)