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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)

#201

Post by throw0101b »

whartung wrote: post #63

As a desktop user, I am content with APFS. The only feature from ZFS that I would like, is the corruption detection. I honestly don't know how robust the image and video formats are to bit corruption. On the one hand, potentially, "very" robust. But on the other, I would think that there are some very special bits that if toggled can potentially "ruin" the entire file. But I don't know. However, I can say, every time…

> As a desktop user, I am content with APFS. The only feature from ZFS that I would like, is the corruption detection.

I think some power users would appreciate an equivalent to zfs send/recv.

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

#202

Post by throw0101b »

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…

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

Solaris had this about a decade ago with beadm:

* https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53394_01/html/E54749/gpxnl.html

FreeBSD has had it for several years as well. If Linux lacks it that is a failure of Linux (distros) not ZFS.

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

#203

Post by cryptonector »

DannyBee wrote: post #181
cryptonector wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> indemnification That was the sticking point. In the context of the NetApp lawsuit Apple wanted indemnification should Sun/Oracle lose the suit.

That would be surprising - indemnification is usually very cheap to provide even for this sort of thing - there is always an insurer willing to sell you the policy you need to provide it at some reasonable price :)

There may have been more to it than that. IIRC the exact details of why Apple abandoned ZFS were never made public. Indemnification was the clearest and most likely issue, though it might also have been that leaks from the Sun side didn't help.

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

#204

Post by tw04 »

ahl wrote: post #170
tw04 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether the claims were valid or not I guess we'll never know given Oracle and NetApp decided to settle. What I DO knows is that if the non-infringement were as open and shut as you and Bryan are suggesting, Apple probably wouldn't have scrapped years of effort and likely millions in R&D for no reason. It's not like they couldn't afford some lawyers to defend a frivelous lawsuit...

Maybe! Bryan and I were pretty close to the case and to the implementation of ZFS. But maybe Apple did detect some smoking gun of which somehow we were unaware. I (still) think Jonathan’s preannouncement was the catalyst for Apple changing direction.

I will just say I can’t thank both of you enough. I cut my teeth on zfs and it was a pillar of the rest of my career.

It’s a constant reminder to me of the value of giving that college kid free access to your code so they can become the next expert doing something creative you never thought of.

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

#205

Post by ahl »

porjo wrote: post #161
ahl wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly one would build something different starting in 2025 rather than 2001, but do you have specific examples of how ZFS’s design holds it back? I think it has been adapted extremely well for the changing ecosystem.

This presentation from 2022 covers the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v8sl8gj9UnA Note: sound drops out for a couple minutes at 1:30 mark but comes back.

I didn't watch it in its entirety, but I'm familiar with Allan's work. There doesn't seem to be anything fundamental to the design of ZFS that his talk highlights as limiting, but there are many areas that have benefitted from optimization and tuning.

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

#206

Post by worthless-trash »

wkat4242 wrote: post #200
worthless-trash wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did say that a most linux admins dont really care.. which has been edited out now.

Huh no I never spoke of Linux users

Did i respond to the wrong thread then? I'm pretty sure there was context around "linux users dont really seem to care about zfs licencing".

Are you saying you didnt edit the post ?

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

#207

Post by rollcat »

water9 wrote: post #198
rollcat wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how hard would it be to detect which single bit was flipped? As ryao noted, in JPEGs it's immediately obvious where the image was corrupted - by visual inspection. Similar for videos, you only need to inspect the data following a single I-frame. Even for bitmap/text files, you could just scan the entire file, try flipping one bit at a time, and compare the result with the checksum. Unlike e.g. KDFs, checksum…

What if you had two bit flips?

That would be a terrible coincidence :,) however improbable, still possible.

Even proper high-end server-grade ECC ram guarantees "only" SECDED (single error correction, double error detection).

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

#208

Post by throw0101b »

tw04 wrote: post #168
bcantrill wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 settleme…

We can agree to disagree. Your own link states that Sun approached NetApp about patents 18 months prior to the lawsuit being filed (to be clear that was Storagetek before Sun acquired them): >The suit was filed in September 2007, in Texas, three years ago, but the spat between the two started 18 months before that, according to NetApp, when Sun's lawyers contacted NetApp saying its products violated Sun patents, and…

> And the original paper on ZFS that appears to have been scrubbed from the internet mentions WAFL repeatedly (and you were a co-author so I'm not sure why you're saying you didn't reference NetApp or WAFL):

Cantrill was not involved in ZFS, and was not a co-author. Cantrill was involved with DTrace:

* https://www.usenix.org/conference/2004-usenix-annual-technic...

* https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall05/cos518/p...

And the ZFS paper has hardly been scrubbed given it is widely cited:

* https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~rhodes/cs134/readings/The%20Zettabyt...

And the fact that the ZFS paper cites WAFL is hardly an indication of anything, given that NetApp's patent cites a whole bunch of other patents:

* https://patents.google.com/patent/US5819292#patentCitations

Heck, some of the cited patents were Sun's.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetApp#Legal_dispute_with_Sun_...

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

#209

Post by throw0101b »

cryptonector wrote: post #180
tw04 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can agree to disagree. Your own link states that Sun approached NetApp about patents 18 months prior to the lawsuit being filed (to be clear that was Storagetek before Sun acquired them): >The suit was filed in September 2007, in Texas, three years ago, but the spat between the two started 18 months before that, according to NetApp, when Sun's lawyers contacted NetApp saying its products violated Sun patents, and…

> The file system that has come closest to our design principles, other than ZFS itself,is WAFL[8],the file system used internally by Network Appliance’s NFS server appliances. That was unnecessary, but that does not betray even the slightest risk of violating NetApp's patents. It just brings attention. Also, it's not true! The BSD 4.4 log-structured filesystem is such a close analog to ZFS that I think it's clear th…

> I guess Bonwick et. al. were not really aware of LFS. Sad.

They were:

> [16] Mendel Rosenblum and John K. Ousterhout. The design and implementation of a log-structured file system. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 10(1):26–52, 1992.

> [17] Margo Seltzer, Keith Bostic, Marshall K. McKusick, and Carl Staelin. An implementation of a log-structured file system for UNIX. In Proceedings of the 1993 USENIX Winter Technical Conference, 1993.

* https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~rhodes/cs134/readings/The%20Zettabyt...

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