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ZFS Confirmed In Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Jun 11, 2008 04:11 PM
from the if-you-need-to-have-an-OS-name-tattoo dept.
from the if-you-need-to-have-an-OS-name-tattoo dept.
number655321 writes "Apple has confirmed the inclusion of ZFS in the forthcoming OS X Server Snow Leopard. From Apple's site: 'For business-critical server deployments, Snow Leopard Server adds read and write support for the high-performance, 128-bit ZFS file system, which includes advanced features such as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots.' CTO of Storage Technologies at Sun Microsystems, Jeff Bonwick, is hosting a discussion on his blog. What does this mean for the 'client' version of OS X Snow Leopard?"
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Technology: OS X Snow Leopard Details 489 comments
JD-1027 writes in to kick off a discussion of OS X Snow Leopard. Apple's stated goal: "Taking a break from adding new features, Snow Leopard — scheduled to ship in about a year — builds on Leopard's enormous innovations by delivering a new generation of core software technologies that will streamline Mac OS X, enhance its performance, and set new standards for quality." The technologies: Grand Central to get better use of multiple processors and multicore chips, OpenCL to tap the power of the GPU, 64 bit so we can finally have our 16 TB of RAM, QuickTime X for optimized modern codec performance, and built in Exchange support in iCal, Address Book, and Apple Mail that most likely will help get Macs into corporate environments. We've previously discussed ZFS in the server version of Snow Leopard."
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Apple Removes Nearly All Reference To ZFS 361 comments
Roskolnikov writes "Apple has apparently decided that ZFS isn't really ready for prime time. We've been discussing Apple/ZFS rumors, denials, and sightings for some years now. Currently a search on Apple's site for ZFS yields only two hits, one of them probably an oversight in the ZFS-cleansing program and the other a reference to open source. Contrast this with an item from the Google cache regarding ZFS and Snow Leopard. Apple has done this kind of disappearing act in the past, but I was really hoping that this was one feature promise they would keep. I certainly hope this isn't the first foot in the grave for ZFS on OS X."
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What does this mean for 'client'? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What does this mean for 'client'? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm no expert on ZFS, I just did a google search on 'zfs benchmark' and then on 'zfs memory usage' and pulled information from the first few results. Maybe someone who actually knows something can chime in?
Parent
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Nitpick: it definitely likes a lot of RAM, but it doesn't necessarily use it inefficiently. Car analogy: a semi truck is fuel efficient, even though it's gas mileage is a lot lower than a sedan's.
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Even XFS is on par with ZFS (with lower cpu utilization) for nonclustered performanc
"All features on this page are subject to change" (Score:5, Informative)
I was under the impression that they had initially hoped to include such in Leopard.
However, it isn't just Apple, Microsoft has been working on various structured file systems (WinFS through OFS and Storage+) for nearly 20 years with no shipped products
Re:"All features on this page are subject to chang (Score:5, Funny)
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How will I benefit? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok, I'm reasonably technical, but not savvy with the intimate workings of a file system. What will this mean for the average user with an iMac or MacbookPro, when ZFS finally appears as the default FS of OS X? Will it be faster, more error-resistant, or...?
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ZFS uses super-paranoidal checksumming which can detect drive problems in advance.
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Re:How will I benefit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, there are lot of real cases where malfunctioning drive can silently write incorrect data. ZFS will help you in this case.
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Actually S.M.A.R.T. is an amazing tool and is utterly invaluable in monitoring drive health... IF and ONLY IF you have the appropriate software (windows: google it, *nix: smartmontools) AND know how to read the resulting output.
The reason many people think SMART sucks and I say to check SMART manually is because 95% of drive manufactures set the threshold or "fail" values WAAAAY too high or low!
I use SMART constantly (about once every other week) to "check in" on how healthy my drives are and knowing how
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Also, Google's on hard drive survey seems to come to the same conclusion: "One of those we thought was most intriguing was that drives often needed replacement for issues that SMART drive status polling didn't or couldn't determine, and 56% of failed drives did not raise any significant SMART flags"
http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/mass [engadget.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
e.g. Seagate are one of the few vendors who are honest about ECC correction and seek error rates, and their SMART counters are correspondingly huge and read rather poorly (50-60/100 is a common value); you can even graph them and see the rates sweep up and down as the drive moves the heads
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Re:How will I benefit? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ob. Apple Joke referencing earlier
Of course, the delay for the consumer OSX support of zfs will have to wait until they code in skipping backups of your iTunes library!
Parent
Re:How will I benefit? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, GP was talking about ZONE root filesystems, which have absolutely nothing to do with the bootloader, since the zone runs on top of the underlying global zone. You CAN put a zone root on ZFS at the moment, but Sun neither recommends nor supports that setup.
For SPARC machines, it'll require new OpenBoot firmware that understands zfs.
And this is simply untrue, period, even for non-zone ZFS root filesystems. OpenBoot loads the next stage of boot code by reading raw data from blocks 1-8 of the chosen slice of the boot disk, and THAT is the code that needs to be able understand the filesystem that will be mounted as root (UFS, ZFS, or whatever). OpenBoot only needs to understand the disk label/partitioning and to be able to read the disk blocks. It already does that, so non-zone ZFS root will NOT require any modifications or upgrades to OpenBoot, just updates to the bootloader code that is written to the disk in blocks 1-8.
Parent
Re:How will I benefit? (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine having an external HDD on your mac. Whenever you plug it in, it automatically starts mirroring the internal drive.
Take atomic snapshots of your entire filesystem, send it over scp to back up your drive as a single file. Or, send over the difference between two snapshots as an incremental backup.
Have more than one drive, want mirroring? 2 steps on the command line.
Have a directory you really care about? Make it a sub-filesystem (this doesn't involve partitioning, etc, just a command that's almost identical in syntax and performance to mkdir) and tell ZFS to store 2 or 3 copies of it.
Have a directory you'd like auto-compressed? Tell zfs to compress it. New data to it is automatically, and transparently compressed. Completely transparent to the user and to applications.
And I'm just getting started. Trust me on this, google it.
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Re:How will I benefit? (Score:5, Informative)
ZFS: The last word on filesystems [sun.com]
Why ZFS for home [blogspot.com]
Why ZFS Rocks [acu.edu]
ZFS: what "the ultimate file system" really means for your desktop -- in plain English! [apcmag.com]
Parent
Re:How will I benefit? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd much rather have volume or block level snapshots, like with LVM and other similar systems. Those systems provide RO and RW snapshots, dynamic partitioning, drive spanning, etc., and can be easily layered with other block-level components to provide compression, encryption, remote storage, etc. as well. All that without tying you to a single file system (though that may be a moot point on OS X, as it will only boot from HFS/HFS+ AFAIK).
If you really wanted to you could even write a script that takes no arguments other than a path name and automatically created a series of volumes of an appropriate size for the folder you selected, setup software raid to mirror them into a single device, mount the device with a compression filter, format it (with any file system) mount it normally, move the data over, drop the old data, rebind the mount point to the old path name, and update fstab. The only thing you miss here that ZFS may be able to do (I didn't check) is avoid closing the files that are moved.
I'm not saying the features ZFS has are useless -- I think they are great -- they just aren't all that new and exciting. They might be new OS X, or repackaged in a way that's easy to consume, but they are things that anyone with big disks has been doing for years.
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Re:How will I benefit? (Score:5, Informative)
It is not possible to make consistent block-level snapshots without filesystem support. If your filesystem doesn't support snapshotting, it must be remounted read-only in order to take a consistent snapshot. This is true for all filesystems. When they are mounted read-write, there may be changes that are only partially written to disk, and creating a snapshot will save the filesystem in an inconsistent state. If you want to mount that filesystem, you'll need to repair it first.
Parent
Re:How will I benefit? (Score:5, Interesting)
-Say I want to take hourly snapshots, and retain them for a month. When the parent data for a ZFS snapshot changes, ZFS merely has to leave the old data alone. OTOH, LVM must copy the block to every snapshot before it can change it in the parent. My hourly snapshots will quickly cause my disk to thrash to a halt with LVM and using much more space, while ZFS incurs a negligible penalty.
-LVMs allow dynamic partitioning, but they can't share capacity on the fly. If I delete a file on an LVM-hosted filesystem, that space becomes available to the filesystem but not all the others. Unless I shrink the filesystem, generally requiring that I take it offline for a while.
-Another layer could potentially handle checksums on LVMs, but in practice Linux can't do this properly by itself.
-ZFS can use other layers, there's just a substantial benefit to letting it run the show.
The only reason this won't turn out to be a huge disadvantage for Linux is that BTRFS [kernel.org] will provide most of the same features. Layering can be a very helpful design tool, but there are times it becomes a hinderence. It's important to be flexible when there's benefits to integrating stuff into a single layer.
Parent
Re:How will I benefit? (Score:5, Interesting)
For one thing it would make the implementation of Time Machine much simpler. No more directory tree full of hard links and such. If they put it on other boxes (like Time Capsule) they could unify the format (it uses a different storage method). Then you could pull the Time Capsule drive, stick it in your Mac, and be all set.
For servers, it has all the standard ZFS benefits (easy storage adding, redundancy, performance, etc).
For home users, it would let you simply plug a new drive in your Mac, press a button, and have it just add space to your main drive. You wouldn't need to specifically setup a RAID. No resizing. No "external drive" if you don't want it that way. Just buy a drive, plug it in, and it's all handled for you.
Parent
Re:How will I benefit? (Score:4, Insightful)
For home users, it would let you simply plug a new drive in your Mac, press a button, and have it just add space to your main drive. You wouldn't need to specifically setup a RAID. No resizing. No "external drive" if you don't want it that way. Just buy a drive, plug it in, and it's all handled for you.
I'm not sure you'd want it to work this way for external drives. Will they be available at crucial parts of boot time when some important files are striped across them? Even if they are, you're basically unable to ever remove the external drive again. If there's a problem with the drive, all your data is lost. Probably the way these drives work now is better. Maybe mirroring onto an external drive would work ok, but it would then be an undesirable write bottleneck.
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Re:How will I benefit? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Indeed. (Score:2)
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More efficient backups. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is great for backing up large files containing frequent but small changes. For example encrypted disk-images, parallels windows disk images, database files, the Entourage email box, or home videos you are in the process of editing etc.
Right now Time Machine creates an entire copy of the file each time it changes, making it unsuitable for backing up these types of files, and so you are encourage to exclude those files from backup. ZFS could fix that.
It could also make adding disk space more seamless, if desired. Slap on an external Firewire drive or even airport, click the "Add to storage pool button", and suddenly it just acts like part of your system drive. You don't have to worry about what is stored where.
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I dunno if I trust it yet. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I dunno if I trust it yet. (Score:5, Informative)
I've been running zfs on solaris oracle servers for a bit and it is REALLY NICE in my opinion. They have also continually improved the auto-tuning aspects so you don't even have to worry about some of the settings that were often tuned even two releases ago (10u2 vs 10u4).
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As far as RAM requirements, ive seen various opinions ranging from 1GB to 2GB's as being a "sufficient" amount, but 4GB+ being ideal... and a Minimum of 768MB... if thats true, and if that is also including general ram use for other things, thats not so bad...
The only major limitation (according to Wikipedia http://en.wiki [wikipedia.org]
Re:I dunno if I trust it yet. (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
possible use (Score:5, Funny)
What does it mean for the client? (Score:2)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/ [apple.com]
Standardizing file systems (Score:4, Interesting)
Say I have a portable USB hard drive or a dead motherboard in one system and want to retrieve the data off a hard drive. One computer has Windows and the other is Nix or OSX. Generally, the file system one could use that *should* work between Windows, Mac and 'Nix was Fat32. There are some issues with FAT32, the least of which is lack of support for large hard drives. The only other ways I can think of transferring the data are via Network or using a OS hook to read the data.
I just switched from Apple to Windows. I've been using an app to read my HFS+ file system on Windows to get data off the hard drive. It works well, but its not build-in. Nor is read/write NTFS access in other OSes. In any case, getting the data has been a bit of a pain. A standard file system I can just plug in a drive no problem would be awesome.
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Re:Finaly (Score:5, Insightful)
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Frankly until ZFS gets cluster and HSM capabilities it is rather uninteresting.
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We can finaly fill up more than 8 TB on this FS. Anyone up to try?(with what?)
Rookie. My swap space is 8 TB.
Re:Finaly (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Finaly (Score:4, Funny)
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No, license issues (Score:3, Informative)
Not until OpenSolaris and Linux are both GPLv3.
ZFS is patented and patent protection is only conferred through use of CDDL'ed code, which isn't compatible with GPLv2. A cleanroom implementation of ZFS, besides being redundant, has no license to use ZFS's patented technology. Whether Sun would sue a linux dev over this is a separate issue.
BSD implemented a Solaris compatibility layer to use the CDDL code directly, but their license isn't incompatible.
Jeff and Lin
Re:No, I am understanding just fine. (Score:4, Insightful)
http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1242.html [apple.com]
In fact, every filesystem OS X supports is written using this mechanism, out of the box:
[gutro:~/] gutter% ls -1
AppleShare
URLMount
afpfs.fs
cd9660.fs
cddafs.fs
ftp.fs
hfs.fs
msdos.fs
nfs.fs
ntfs.fs
smbfs.fs
udf.fs
ufs.fs
webdav.fs
zfs.fs
Your most recent tirade seems to be a complaint about the lack of available filesystems, which I guess is a reasonable complaint, but that's not what you orignally asked for. Then you asked for a simple package you could download and install, and again, the original reply contained one (MacFUSE). Granted, that's a poor example, because it hides OS X's native pluggable FS support behind the FUSE pluggable FS support, but that doesn't mean that the AC was wrong. You can go and download the MacFUSE package, and the sshfs package, install them using the standard installer, and begin using a filesystem that works over SSH, no compiling necessary. (Incidentally, that one is super handy).
In short, the original reply by the AC was 100% correct, and you were 100% wrong, (and seemingly unable to comprehend his reasonable explanations) and somehow by sheer bluster, you seem to have convinced everyone of the opposite.
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