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ZFS for Mac OS X Breaths New Life

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Re: ZFS for Mac OS X Breaths New Life

#12
What I'm actually more interested in is what Apple is intending on using instead of ZFS.

All indications are that ZFS will not be the next filesystem for OS X, yet they'll need to replace HFS soon seeing as it's the worst-performing and fewest-featured filesystem in use with this generation of operating systems. HFS+ is showing its age in multiple places, and Apple could really take advantage of some of the newer features available in modern filesystems to make a huge difference and increase the power and performance behind some of the current features (a la Time Machine), with techniques such as snapshots, transactioned reads/writes, and more.

Re: ZFS for Mac OS X Breaths New Life

#13
post #5

"Breaths new life" is a bit misleading' no? From the project page: "this code project will be used to record issues and ongoing development (if any) of this extension" As well, only a single commit to the git repo since July. :(

Depends on which one you're looking at. Alex's repo has a tremendous amount of work. I've been doing little work since the initial build and installer since work picked up.

I went ahead and merged mine up.

Re: ZFS for Mac OS X Breaths New Life

#14
post #13
post #5

"Breaths new life" is a bit misleading' no? From the project page: "this code project will be used to record issues and ongoing development (if any) of this extension" As well, only a single commit to the git repo since July. :(

Depends on which one you're looking at. Alex's repo has a tremendous amount of work. I've been doing little work since the initial build and installer since work picked up. I went ahead and merged mine up.

Ah, I see now. Hiding on the "untested" branch. :-)

Sorry for any confusion then, and I stand corrected.

Re: ZFS for Mac OS X Breaths New Life

#15
post #7

Does anyone know if Oracle is still developing ZFS, or just Btrfs? Has the situation changed so that Apple may include it on next iterations of OS X, or are we stuck with HSF+ forever?

ZFS is more appropriate for servers; I suspect we'll see some developments in the filesystem area later this year as Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" gets closer to shipping.

Re: ZFS for Mac OS X Breaths New Life

#16

What I'm actually more interested in is what Apple is intending on using instead of ZFS. All indications are that ZFS will not be the next filesystem for OS X, yet they'll need to replace HFS soon seeing as it's the worst-performing and fewest-featured filesystem in use with this generation of operating systems. HFS+ is showing its age in multiple places, and Apple could really take advantage of some of the newer fea…

Don't forget about the block-level deduplication and copy-on-write which would make Time Machine use much less space.

Re: ZFS for Mac OS X Breaths New Life

#17
ZFS runs amazingly well on FreeBSD at the moment. Very, very stable and incredible. I love having to not worry about bad blocks / sectors anymore! I also love raid-z2 which allows 2 failed drives simultaneously. Just an amazing comfort. We can see this on Mac OS X with some effort!

Re: ZFS for Mac OS X Breaths New Life

#18
post #7

Does anyone know if Oracle is still developing ZFS, or just Btrfs? Has the situation changed so that Apple may include it on next iterations of OS X, or are we stuck with HSF+ forever?

ZFS is more appropriate for servers; I suspect we'll see some developments in the filesystem area later this year as Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" gets closer to shipping.

ZFS is wonderful for workstations. It keeps redundant copies of blocks and has parity functionality to keep you from having silent corruption and allowing a bad drive to sneak up on you. Running a consulting business I see many hundreds of computers yearly come in with just this problem alone for hard drive failure and ZFS would make everyone's lives so much happier just on workstations alone.

Re: ZFS for Mac OS X Breaths New Life

#19
post #5

"Breaths new life" is a bit misleading' no? From the project page: "this code project will be used to record issues and ongoing development (if any) of this extension" As well, only a single commit to the git repo since July. :(

I was so excited to see just how alive this is! I was hunting around and about to start the project myself when I saw this and thought everyone else would be so excited to see that a package release was just put out a few hours ago. Great to see and I think that with some support we can really help these guys along and all really enjoy some wonderful fruit.
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