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

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

#151

Post by timc3 »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #64
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.

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…

You do realise that in your use cases you still need reliable filesystems both in the cloud and on devices.

Because any corruption at any point will get synced as a change, or worse can cause failure.

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

#152

Post by phatskat »

Modified3019 wrote: post #102
tmoertel wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hell, I’ve never even had bad ram. To what degree can you separate this claim from "I've never noticed RAM failures"?

You can take that as meaning “I’ve never had a noticed issue that was detected by extensive ram testing, or solved by replacing ram”. I got into overclocking both regular and ECC DDR4 ram for a while when AMD’s 1st gen ryzen stuff came out, thanks to asrock’s x399 motherboard which unofficially supporting ECC, allowing both it’s function and reporting of errors (produced when overlocking) Based on my own testing and…

My friends and I spent a lot of our middle and high school days building computers from whatever parts we could find, and went through a lot of sourcing components everywhere from salvaged throwaways to local computer shops, when those were a thing. We hit our fair share of bad RAM, and by that I mean a handful of sticks at best.

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

#153

Post by zie »

crazygringo wrote: post #124
zie wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I would disagree that disks alone are good enough for daily consumer use. I see corruption often enough to be annoying with consumer grade hardware without ECC & ZFS. Small images are where people usually notice. They tend to be heavily compressed and small in size means minor changes can be more noticeable. In larger files, corruption tends to not get noticed as much in my experience.

We have 10k+ consumer devices at work and corruption is not exactly common, but it's not rare either. A few cases a year are usually identified at the helpdesk level. It seems to be going down over time, since hardware is getting more reliable, we have a strong replacement program and most people don't store stuff locally anymore. Our shared network drives all live on machines with ECC & ZFS.

We had a cloud provider recently move some VM's to new hardware for us, the ones with ZFS filesystems noticed corruption, the ones with ext4/NTFS/etc filesystems didn't notice any corruption. We made the provider move them all again, the second time around ZFS came up clean. Without ZFS we would have never known, as none of the EXT4/NTFS FS's complained at all. Who knows if all the ext4/NTFS machines were corruption free, it's anyone's guess.

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

#154

Post by bcantrill »

tw04 wrote: post #140
cryptonector wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NetApp lawsuit. Apple wanted indemnification, and Sun/Oracle did not want to indemnify Apple. At the time that NetApp filed its lawsuit I blogged about how ZFS was a straightforward evolution of BSD 4.4's log structured filesystem. I didn't know that to be the case historically, that is, I didn't know if Bonwick was inspired by LFS, but I showed how almost in every way ZFS was a simple evolution of LFS. I showed…

While I was disappointed that NetApp sued, the ZFS team literally referenced NetApp and WAFL multiple times in their presenations IIRC. They were kind of begging to be sued. Also, according to NetApp, "Sun started it". https://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center-networking/neta...

No, the ZFS team did not "literally reference NetApp and WAFL" in their presentations and no, Sun did not "start it" -- NetApp initiated the litigation (though Sun absolutely countersued), and NetApp were well on their way to losing not only their case but also their WAFL patents when Oracle acquired Sun. Despite having inherited a winning case, Oracle chose to allow the suit to be dismissed[0]; terms of the settlement were undisclosed.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2010/09/09/oracle_netapp_zfs_dis...

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

#155

Post by ahl »

tw04 wrote: post #140
cryptonector wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NetApp lawsuit. Apple wanted indemnification, and Sun/Oracle did not want to indemnify Apple. At the time that NetApp filed its lawsuit I blogged about how ZFS was a straightforward evolution of BSD 4.4's log structured filesystem. I didn't know that to be the case historically, that is, I didn't know if Bonwick was inspired by LFS, but I showed how almost in every way ZFS was a simple evolution of LFS. I showed…

While I was disappointed that NetApp sued, the ZFS team literally referenced NetApp and WAFL multiple times in their presenations IIRC. They were kind of begging to be sued. Also, according to NetApp, "Sun started it". https://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center-networking/neta...

Seems specious. Patents don't preclude one from overtly trying to compete; they protect specific mechanisms. In this case either ZFS didn't use the same mechanisms or the mechanisms themselves were found to have prior art.

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

#156

Post by exidy »

wkat4242 wrote: post #135
badc0ffee wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows has a really good basis for it though, in volume shadow copy. I also don't understand why Microsoft never built a time machine based on that. Well, they kinda did but only on samba shares. But not locally. But these days they want you to subscribe to their cloud storage so the versioning is done there, which makes sense in their commercial point of view. I think snapshots on ZFS are better than time machine t…

Hard links[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_(macOS)#Operation

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

#157

Post by smittywerben »

cryptonector wrote: post #142
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?

> Is it fair to say ZFS made most sense on Solaris using Solaris Containers on SPARK? You mean SPARC. And no, ZFS stands alone. But yes, containers were a lot faster to create using ZFS.

Thanks I didn't notice until now. I miskeyed SPARC on my iPhone keyboard.

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

#158

Post by Intermernet »

wkat4242 wrote: post #135
badc0ffee wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows has a really good basis for it though, in volume shadow copy. I also don't understand why Microsoft never built a time machine based on that. Well, they kinda did but only on samba shares. But not locally. But these days they want you to subscribe to their cloud storage so the versioning is done there, which makes sense in their commercial point of view. I think snapshots on ZFS are better than time machine t…

Shadow Protect by StorageCraft was brilliant. Pretty sure MS actually licensed Shadow Copy from them, but I could be mistaken. It's been a while since I played in that space.

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

#159

Post by crossroadsguy »

krupan wrote: post #149

"Still another version I’ve heard calls into question the veracity of their purported friendship, and has Steve instead suggesting that Larry go f*ck himself. Normally the iconoclast, that would, if true, represent Steve’s most mainstream opinion." LOL!! I really hope they weren't friends, that really shatters my internal narrative (mainly because I can't actually picture either of them having actual friends).

[flagged]

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

#160

Post by shellac »

exidy wrote: post #156
wkat4242 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows has a really good basis for it though, in volume shadow copy. I also don't understand why Microsoft never built a time machine based on that. Well, they kinda did but only on samba shares. But not locally. But these days they want you to subscribe to their cloud storage so the versioning is done there, which makes sense in their commercial point of view. I think snapshots on ZFS are better than time machine t…

Hard links[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_(macOS)#Operation

Hard links are only used on HFS+. APFS has snapshot support.
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