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Apple File System

developer.apple.com

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Re: Apple File System

#281

Post by astrodust »

ahl wrote: post #237
watersb wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I was a heavy user of ZFS on Mac OS X back then. Was on the developer mailing list for that implentation, submitting bugs and talking to Apple developers working like mad to ship it. Then Steve Jobs' buddy Larry bought Sun, and licensing of ZFS became basically impossible to sort out on time. So they dropped it. Was that 2007 or 2009?

The Sun acquisition was announced in 2009 and closed in 2010. It may have been related, but I have my own suspicions about about what caused Apple to jettison their port.

Given the mountain of legal shit Google has been subjected to over Java, the last thing Apple wanted was to have to answer to Larry's lawyers. ZFS, awesome as it is, has been poisoned.

Re: Apple File System

#282

Post by astrodust »

Twirrim wrote: post #31
cstross wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZFS on OSX was doomed the moment Oracle bought Sun. If you want to know why, just contemplate the smoking wreckage of the Oracle/Google Java API lawsuit.

ZFS is on a completely open source license. Oracle's beef with Google comes from actions that occurred before Java was open sourced. It's hard to see how the two scenarios are even remotely related, other than "Oracle"

Open-source is great, but if that source is covered by patents you're potentially liable for damages. Nobody would ever willingly expose themselves to that.

Re: Apple File System

#283

Post by PakG1 »

This is interesting because just yesterday I saw a discussion here on HN about how sad people were that Apple was doing nothing to improve OSX and was putting all the focus on iOS instead. Heh.

Re: Apple File System

#284

Post by astrodust »

cpr wrote: post #137
pducks32 wrote: post #116

I read the link and have a pretty good understanding about how computers and file systems work but can someone "explain like I'm a decently intelligent programmer" what is different about this file system? Thanks you.

They simply started from scratch with an aim to * best support modern hardware technologies, * start from the state of the art in file systems (like ZFS and btrfs, old as they may be), and also * emphasize security.

Sounds a lot like what Apple did with Swift.

Re: Apple File System

#285

Post by zaphar »

wstrange wrote: post #248
wcummings wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does AAPL feel about the CDDL?

Given that there are other companies shipping ZFS without Oracle's blessing, I am curious why Apple could not do the same? (honest question) Is it that Apple is a much bigger target? Patent issues?

Many of those companies probably started using ZFS before Oracle acquired Sun. After Oracle acquired Sun the risks of using ZFS skyrocketed legally and Apple had the option of just not taking on that risk since they hadn't shipped it yet.

Given what we know about Oracle that was probably the right call.

Re: Apple File System

#286

Post by nisa »

userbinator wrote: post #280
nisa wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least with bigger SATA disks I see regularly checksum errors on btrfs/ZFS and a rising bad sector count. The disk usually replaces the sectors on the next write but when reading it returns either zeros or wrong data. It's nice to know what files are affected from bad sectors. It's not common but common enough to have it.

What sort of "bigger SATA disks" are you using, or how are you treating them? If I see one bad sector develop on a disk for no obvious reason, it's getting replaced ASAP because it's a sign that more will follow very soon.

several hundreds of 4TB HGST enterprise in a cluster at university. Disks get replaced ASAP but I'm seeing the checksum errors often in the logfiles when a disk starts to collapse.

Btw: So far the Backblaze reliability numbers check out (<1% annual failure rate)

Re: Apple File System

#287

Post by chongli »

wstrange wrote: post #250
skrause wrote: post #19

No checksumming?

I have a theory on this regarding consumer devices: Checksumming drives a lot of support calls that would otherwise not happen. As long as the errors are in media files and not meta-data, most consumers are going to be oblivious to bit rot in their downloaded movies and photos. Enabling checksumming is going to reveal a lot of errors that would otherwise be silently ignored (spoken from experience running a ZFS media…

Just because you do checksumming doesn't mean you have to report those errors in a way that might frighten a non-technical user. How many regular Mac users sit there looking at the syslog all day?

Re: Apple File System

#288

Post by wmf »

ahl wrote: post #237
watersb wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I was a heavy user of ZFS on Mac OS X back then. Was on the developer mailing list for that implentation, submitting bugs and talking to Apple developers working like mad to ship it. Then Steve Jobs' buddy Larry bought Sun, and licensing of ZFS became basically impossible to sort out on time. So they dropped it. Was that 2007 or 2009?

The Sun acquisition was announced in 2009 and closed in 2010. It may have been related, but I have my own suspicions about about what caused Apple to jettison their port.

It's like no one here remembers the NetApp lawsuit.

Re: Apple File System

#289

Post by rangibaby »

watersb wrote: post #189
ahl wrote: post #161

The spartan description of APFS certainly sounds like the (partial) feature list for ZFS--the comparisons made in the comments here are on-point. ZFS though took around 5 years to ship and, arguably, another 5-10 to get right. I say this having shipped multiple products based on ZFS, writing code in ZFS, and diagnosing production problems with it. On-disk consistency ("crash protection"), snapshots, encryption, and t…

Yes. I was a heavy user of ZFS on Mac OS X back then. Was on the developer mailing list for that implentation, submitting bugs and talking to Apple developers working like mad to ship it. Then Steve Jobs' buddy Larry bought Sun, and licensing of ZFS became basically impossible to sort out on time. So they dropped it. Was that 2007 or 2009?

2009. I remember ZFS was coming in Snow Leopard. Then it wasn't

/edit

https://web.archive.org/web/20080721031014/http://www.apple....

Re: Apple File System

#290

Post by wmf »

userbinator wrote: post #278
amelius wrote: post #160

I hope finally a filesystem that allows me to unplug a USB drive (while it is still mounted) without potentially corrupting it.

Any filesystem that doesn't cache writes will basically have that property, unless you're talking about unplugging while write operations are happening , in which case all bets are off.

The point of journaling/soft updates/COW/etc. is that all bets are not off; they're intended to prevent the fs from being corrupted in those sorts of situations.
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