Comments on: Mac ZFS is dead

By: Czego nadal brakuje nam w MAC OS X

Czego nadal brakuje nam w MAC OS X — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 19:51:47 +0000

[...] co do zfs-a to sa sprzeczne inormacje. Podobno prace zostały zaniechane: Mac ZFS is dead coc z drugiej strony ZFS/Mac coming soon | ZDNet albo Will Mac OS X 10.7 Lion use ZFS? [...]

By: s9y testdrive

s9y testdrive — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 04:24:21 +0000

ZFS FTW!…

While the upgrade to 10.6 failed miserably, I used the rest of this Sunday to install 10.6 from scratch and now we have: $ uname -rv 10.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.0.0: Fri Jul 31 22:47:34 PDT 2009; root:xnu-1456.1.25~1/RELEASE_I386 I was cur…

By: Joe Kraska

Joe Kraska — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:29:29 +0000

“ZFS is a glorious thing compared to what SUN had. But not all that compelling for the rest of us.”

ZFS would be an awesome thing to the Linux community, if they had it. None of the prevalent file systems, … ext3/4, reiser, or any of the others come close, and BTRFS is not ready.

Joe

By: cjcox

cjcox — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:31:18 +0000

In all fairness, unless you were/are a Sun shop, the ZFS technology really didn’t bring all that much to the table. That’s why most people yawned. Everyone is already using some sort of abstract storage pooling mechanism… there are lots of solutions already out there (long before ZFS).

ZFS gets too many undeserved high marks for curing cancer, etc. It’s not a panacea. Follow the Sun forums and groups and you’ll see what I mean. ZFS is a glorious thing compared to what SUN had. But not all that compelling for the rest of us.

By: Le Blog de ZOC » ZFS sur MacOS X : C’est mort !

Le Blog de ZOC » ZFS sur MacOS X : C’est mort ! — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:24:32 +0000

[...] : StorageMojo. Categories: Apple, Informatique Tags: Apple, macos x, NetApp, Sun, ZFS Commentaires (0) [...]

By: Rex

Rex — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:25:13 +0000

Wes,
Good point. Apple (like Microsoft, Google, and other “platform” providers), really have two sets of customers: developers and purchasers. OpenCL and GCD enable developers to create better apps that will sell more Macs. What features of ZFS will attract a developer, other than the nebulous “less disk corruption”? Developers have lived with horrendous disk corruption on Windows for decades, and some make good money off of cleaning up the mess!

Alan,
“makes sure your data is safe all the time”, and snapshots are both features of a current product (Time Machine), that enables Apple and third parties to make more money by selling disk drive #2. Selling consumers on the somewhat subtle differences between ZFS and Time Machine would be tough. “New! Improved! With end-to-end checksums!”

I really want ZFS in Mac OS X. I’m unhappy Apple dropped ZFS. I’m pointing out that selling ZFS to developers and consumers is tough, and might be one factor in Apple’s decisions.

By: Alan

Alan — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:10:56 +0000

Rex,

I would venture to guess that most Mac users still don’t know what their features are doing, they just know that they like them and that they work. If a consumer’s iPhotos don’t get silently corrupted, that’s a happy consumer; etc. I could see “operating system that makes sure your data is safe all the time” as a point in a Get a Mac ad.

And as far as Time Machine being snapshots, they’re hardly comparable. Time Machine requires a second drive (which is still the necessary for actual backup), and is a huge space hog.

By: Wes Felter

Wes Felter — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:58:06 +0000

I don’t think consumers understand OpenCL or GCD (other than “it’s faster”), but Apple invested in those technologies.

By: Rex

Rex — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:16:50 +0000

Apple dropping ZFS is a big disappointment. Judging by the comments on many other blogs (not here , most people wouldn’t know what a file system does, or why ZFS is better even on laptops, if it bit them someplace painful.

And that might be part of why Apple stopped struggling to integrate ZFS with Mac OS X. Why sink a bunch of engineering effort, legal fees, and expensive NetApp license fees (potentially useless depending on the lawsuit outcome), to implement a feature most consumers won’t understand?

Can you see the Mac vs PC ad that hypes “more reliable disk storage”? Neither can I. Snapshots — Time Machine does that. Other ZFS features are really obscure.

By: Ron

Ron — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:04:29 +0000

I wonder what Implications that law suit has over Nexenta for example.
Which a really nice product, based on Open Solaris.

By: Robin Harris

Robin Harris — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:43:51 +0000

Barry,

Sun open-sourced ZFS to keep the engineers happy, but NetApp says some of the IP in ZFS isn’t Sun’s. So yes, it is open-sourced, but there is an expensive lawsuit over who owns what has been open-sourced.

Once that gets sorted out we’ll know if Sun was within its rights to open-source ZFS. If they weren’t, the people who are using ZFS will be liable to NetApp.

Robin

By: Barry Cohen

Barry Cohen — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:18:18 +0000

Isn’t ZFS open source? Can’t anyone use the code? Doesn’t it (or can’t it) run on Linux? Or, isn’t ZFS part of Solaris which is also OSS? And can be free?

By: John W

John W — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:05:21 +0000

What I don’t understand is why with a variety of filesystem types out there are people so determined to build their own? Save some development costs and use something already tried and true, or better yet, help set a standard so filesystems can be mounted on any architecture.

By: Jeff Darcy

Jeff Darcy — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:42:24 +0000

Unlike many others, I’m not ruling out btrfs yet. Filesystem developers are, of necessity, kernel developers. To the extent that btrfs has dependencies on Linux models or implementations, filesystem developers can resolve those dependencies either by providing the same facilities in another OS or by modifying btrfs to remove the dependency. The effort would be comparable to porting ZFS from Solaris, and either would be far *far* less work than creating a brand new filesystem from scratch. The fact that Apple’s interest in ZFS seems to have waned exactly as btrfs has become usable might not be mere coincidence.