
Apple can do better than ZFS - tragiclos
http://devwhy.blogspot.com/2009/10/loss-of-zfs.html
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bensummers
Having used ZFS on my servers for a few years, it's a bit disappointing that
it's not available on my Mac OS X desktop.

Not necessarily because it's ZFS, which is no longer state of the art. But
because I've come to consider strong cryptographic checksums, free snapshots
and trivial administration of storage as a bare minimum of what's required in
a filesystem.

While ZFS may not be completely suitable for a consumer desktop, it is
available now. Plus with the hierarchical storage features, imagine how
wonderful it would be to have your multi-TB disc accelerated by a few GB of
flash on the motherboard.

It's taken ZFS a long time to get where it is in terms of features and
stability. It may be over five years before Apple can produce something tried
and tested enough to be their new default filesystem.

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oomkiller
I really wish someone would come out with a BSD/MIT licensed filesystem, so
anyone could use it. It wouldn't have to be the one with the most features,
mainly simple and good at storing typical users' files. Currently, it seems
FAT32 is the only thing out there that is able to be implemented without
having to worry too much about patents, licenses etc (with some exceptions).
The only issue is, FAT32 sucks! I have a Canon Rebel camera that can record
videos, but they can only be up to 4GB because of crappy FAT32. It doesn't
matter if I have a 32GB flash/CF card in there, they can still only be 4GB.

~~~
Dobbs
There are some great BSD/MIT licensed filesystems. The BSD's UFS is as good if
not better than NTFS/EXT3/HFS+. It isn't cross platform due to a combination
of being complicated, each systems being slightly different and lack of market
share.

~~~
blasdel
You are high as a kite. UFS is more comparable to ext2, except with more data
loss and not even a pretense of a stable disk format even within the same
platform!

~~~
allenbrunson
that's a textbook example of one of the things pg says _not_ to do here: "When
disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. 'That
is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is
2, not 3.'"

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

you often have knowledgeable things to say, but that's not enough around here.

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Avshalom
"It turned out his research team had about the same number of people working
on their FS as Apple had working on HFS, HFS+, UFS, NFS, WebDAV, FAT, and NTFS
combined. I think people don't appreciate how productive Apple is on a per-
engineer basis."

The thing is that's not quite right. The comparison there is between the crew
maintaining file system support versus the crew implementing a new fs from
scratch. The Author pays lip service in saying it normally takes more than one
OS release to implement a FS, but still underestimates the effort it takes to
make a completely new production ready FS.

Yes ZFS is not the be all end all. BtrFS, distributed FS's like Hammer and
Venti, as well as the occasional complaint about ZFS are exhibits A-? for
that, but that doesn't mean Apple can create an FS of the same sophistication
in the 18? months that they release in.

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patrickgzill
That Apple has not yet done so is unexplained.

My explanation is that filesystem performance on desktop and laptop systems is
not that big a deal; while on larger servers like what ZFS is targeted for,
filesystem performance in all facets is very important.

~~~
kraemate
Oh please, apple is the worst file-system designer on the planet. HFS, HFS+
and what not. Wastes tonnes of space (space allocation+journalling) and i'd
rather use FAT, atleast it is compatible with other operating systems.

Apple should stick to fancy buttons and animation thanks.

~~~
gaius
Hindsight is 20:20. HFS was release in 1985!

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mindaugas
There is HAMMER filesystem by DragonFlyBSD team
<http://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/>

just take it and improve it :)

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cookiecaper
ZFS is several years old now. I'd think someone could implement a filesystem
that borrows many of ZFS's best concepts and adds significant improvement. I
haven't kept a very close eye on btrfs but I hope it meets this since it seems
poised to take over as the new default filesystem in the next few years.

~~~
bad_user
I just don't get it why age matters.

If something is stable and good enough, then why should it be reinvented,
instead of improved?

~~~
allenbrunson
in the case of file systems, 'improving' around the original design decisions
is often impossible. take hfs+ for example: almost all the filesystem metadata
is stored in a single b-tree called the catalog. doing almost anything with an
hfs+ volume requires exclusive access to the catalog, which locks out all
other callers for the duration of the file operation. the solution is to
spread the metadata out to other parts of the disk, but that can't be done
without breaking hfs+ compatibility.

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arnorhs
That theme/website looks really good. Stunning.

I'm kind of off-topic, sorry about that guys.

