ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)

Post by jonhohle » Sun, Apr 27, 2025, 2:24 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #13

twoodfin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like an early application of the Tim Cook doctrine: Why would Apple want to surrender control of this key bit of technology for their platforms? The rollout of APFS a decade later validated this concern. There’s just no way that flawless transition happens so rapidly without a filesystem fit to order for Apple’s needs from Day 0.

I don't see why ZFS wouldn't have gone over equally flawlessly. None of the features that make ZFS special were in HFS(+), so conversion wouldn't be too hard. The only challenge would be maintaining the legacy compression algorithms, but ZFS is configurable enough that Apple could've added their custom compression to it quite easily. There are probably good reasons for Apple to reinvent ZFS as APFS a decade later, bu…

Post by thfuran » Sun, Apr 27, 2025, 2:31 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #29

thfuran wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also insist that you need about 10 TB RAM per TB disk space or something like that.

There is a rule of thumb that you should have at least 1 GB of RAM per TB of disk when using deduplication . That's.... Different.

Post by ghaff » Sun, Apr 27, 2025, 2:37 PM UTC

ahl wrote: post #31

smittywerben wrote: post #22

Thanks for sharing I was just looking for what happened to Sun. I like the second-hand quote comparing the IBM and HP as "garbage trucks colliding" plus the inclusion of blog posts with links to the court filings. Is it fair to say ZFS made most sense on Solaris using Solaris Containers on SPARK?

ZFS was developed in Solaris, and at the time we were mostly selling SPARC systems. That changed rapidly and the biggest commercial push was in the form of the ZFS Storage Appliance that our team (known as Fishworks) built at Sun. Those systems were based on AMD servers that Sun was making at the time such as Thumper [1]. Also in 2016, Ubuntu leaned in to use of ZFS for containers [2]. There was nothing that specific…

Post by crazygringo » Sun, Apr 27, 2025, 2:41 PM UTC

zie wrote: post #27

mrkeen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ZFS is notorious for corrupting itself when bit flips hit it and break the checksum on disk. What's a bit flip?

Basically it's that memory changes out from under you. As we know, computers use Binary, so everything boils down to it being a 0 or a 1. A bit flip is changing what was say a 0 into a 1. Usually attributed to "cosmic rays", but really can happen for any number of less exciting sounding reasons. Basically, there is zero double checking in your computer for almost everything except stuff that goes across the network.…

Post by em500 » Sun, Apr 27, 2025, 2:48 PM UTC

thyristan wrote: post #35

jFriedensreich wrote: post #25

The death of ZFS in macOS was a huge shift in the industry. This has to be seen in the context of microsoft killed their largely ambitious WinFS which felt like the death of desktop innovation in combination.

Both are imho linked to "offline desktop use cases are not important anymore". Both companies saw their future gains elsewhere, in internet-related functions and what became known as "cloud". No need to have a fancy, featurefull and expensive filesystem when it is only to be used as a cache for remote cloud stuff.