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

ahl.dtrace.org

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

#121

Post by mdaniel »

badc0ffee wrote: post #99
wkat4242 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's called marketing. Give it a snazzy name, like say "TimeMachine" and users will jump on it. Also, ZFS has a bad name within the Linux community due to some licensing stuff. I find that most BSD users don't really care about such legalese and most people I know that run FreeBSD are running ZFS on root. Which works amazingly well I might add. Especially with something like sanoid added to it, it basically does th…

Time Machine was released 17 years ago, and I wish Windows had anything that good. And they're on their 3rd backup system since then.

> I wish Windows had anything that good

I can't readily tell how much of the dumbness is from the filesystem and how much from the kernel but the end result is that until it gets away from 1980s version of file locking there's no prayer. Imagine having to explain to your boss that your .docx wasn't backed up because you left Word open over the weekend. A just catastrophically idiotic design

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

#122

Post by lotharcable »

em500 wrote: post #40
thyristan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Linux or FreeBSD developers are free to adopt ZFS as their primary file systems. But it appears that practical benefits are not really evident to most users.

OpenZFS exists and there is a port of it for Mac OS X.

The problem is that it is still owned by Oracle. And Solaris ZFS is incompatible with OpenZFS. Not that people really use Solaris anymore.

It is really unfortunate. Linux has adopted file systems from other operating systems before. It is just nobody trust Oracle.

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

#123

Post by ahl »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #107
GeekyBear wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet connections of the day didn't yet offer enough speed for cloud storage. Apple was already working to integrate ZFS when Oracle bought Sun. From TFA: > ZFS was featured in the keynotes, it was on the developer disc handed out to attendees, and it was even mentioned on the Mac OS X Server website. Apple had been working on its port since 2006 and now it was functional enough to be put on full display. However,…

Was it not open source at that point?

It was! And Apple seemed fine with including DTrace under the CDDL. I’m not sure why Apple wanted some additional arrangement but they did.

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

#124

Post by crazygringo »

zie wrote: post #108
lgg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is ABSOLUTELY incorrect. SSDs have enormous amounts of error detection and correction builtin explicitly because errors on the raw medium are so common that without it you would never be able to read correct data from the device. It has been years since I was familiar enough with the insides of SSDs to tell you exactly what they are doing now, but even ~10-15 years ago it was normal for each raw 2k block to actu…

> I can say with assurance that there is no chance your OS sees uncorrected bits from your flash dies. While true, there is zero promises that what you meant to save and what gets saved are the same things. All the drive mostly promises is that if the drive safely wrote XYZ to the disk and you come back later, you should expect to get XYZ back. There are lots of weasel words there on purpose. There is generally zero…

> While true, there is zero promises that what you meant to save and what gets saved are the same things. All the drive mostly promises is that if the drive safely wrote XYZ to the disk and you come back later, you should expect to get XYZ back.

I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. It's using ECC, so they should be the same bytes.

There isn't infinite reliability, but nothing has infinite reliability. File checksums don't provide infinite reliability either, because the checksum itself can be corrupted.

You keep talking about promises and guarantees, but there aren't any. All there is are statistical rates of reliability. Even ECC RAM or file checksums don't offer perfect guarantees.

For daily consumer use, the level of ECC built into disks is generally plenty sufficient. It's chosen to be so.

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

#126

Post by ethbr1 »

ahl wrote: post #123
mixmastamyk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it not open source at that point?

It was! And Apple seemed fine with including DTrace under the CDDL. I’m not sure why Apple wanted some additional arrangement but they did.

The argument advanced in the piece isn't without merit -- that ripping out DTrace, if subsequent legal developments demanded it, would be a heck of a lot easier than removing a filesystem that would by then contain massive amounts of customer data.

And given what a litigious jackass Larry Ellison / Oracle is, I can't fault Apple for being nervous.

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

#127

Post by mixmastamyk »

ethbr1 wrote: post #126
ahl wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was! And Apple seemed fine with including DTrace under the CDDL. I’m not sure why Apple wanted some additional arrangement but they did.

The argument advanced in the piece isn't without merit -- that ripping out DTrace, if subsequent legal developments demanded it, would be a heck of a lot easier than removing a filesystem that would by then contain massive amounts of customer data. And given what a litigious jackass Larry Ellison / Oracle is, I can't fault Apple for being nervous.

Ironic since the post above tells the story as LE saying no to Jobs.

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

#128

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

ryao wrote: post #79
8fingerlouie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. The business case for providing a robust desktop filesystem simply doesn’t exist anymore. 20 years ago, (regular) people stored their data on computers and those needed to be dependable. Phones existed, but not to the extent they do today. Fast forward 20 years, and many people don’t even own a computer (in the traditional sense, many have consoles). People now have their entire life on their phones, ba…

What do you do when you discover that some thing you have not touched in a long time, but suddenly need, is corrupted and all of your backups are corrupt because the corruption happened prior to your 30 day window at OneDrive? You would have early warning with ZFS. You have data loss with your plan.

You should have bought OneDrive Premium Plus with Extended Backup Storage (tm). This is your fault for not shelling out, stop blaming your computer.

/s

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

#129

Post by worthless-trash »

gruturo wrote: post #98
wkat4242 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's called marketing. Give it a snazzy name, like say "TimeMachine" and users will jump on it. Also, ZFS has a bad name within the Linux community due to some licensing stuff. I find that most BSD users don't really care about such legalese and most people I know that run FreeBSD are running ZFS on root. Which works amazingly well I might add. Especially with something like sanoid added to it, it basically does th…

>I find that most BSD users don't really care about such legalese and most people I know that run FreeBSD are running ZFS on root. What a weird take. BSD's license is compatible with ZFS, that's why. "Don't really care?" Really? Come on.

There is an increase of posts with casual confidence in their own absolute correctnes. I originally attributed it to the influence of llms, but it is becoming so common now it is hard to dismiss.

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

#130

Post by mustache_kimono »

thyristan wrote: post #46
em500 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux or FreeBSD developers are free to adopt ZFS as their primary file systems. But it appears that practical benefits are not really evident to most users.

Lots of ZFS users are enthusiasts who heard about that one magic thing that does it all in one tidy box. Whereas usually you would have to known all the minutiae of LVM/mdadm/cryptsetup/nbd and mkfs.whatever to get to the same point. So while ZFS is the nicer-dicer of volume management and filesystems, the latter is your whole chef's knife set. And while you can dice with both, the user groups are not the same. And e…

> And for the thin-provisioned snapshotted subvolume usecase, btrfs is currently eating ZFS's lunch due to far better Linux integration.

Is this a technical argument? Or is this just more licensing nonsense?

> Think snapshots at every update, and having a/b boot to get back to a known-working config after an update.

I use ZFS and I have snapshots on every update? I have snapshots hourly, daily, weekly and monthly. I have triggered snapshots too, and ad hoc dynamic snapshots too. I wrote about it here: https://kimono-koans.github.io/opinionated-guide/

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