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Apple kills ZFS for Mac
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goMac
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Oct 23, 2009, 04:31 PM
 
Can't believe I beat Besson to the punch...

Apple Shuts Down Open Source ZFS Project - Mac Forums

Looks like it was a licensing issue. The good news is that Apple is hiring an in house team to write a new file system.
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olePigeon
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Oct 23, 2009, 04:33 PM
 
I wonder if this has anything to do with Oracle buying Sun.
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Oct 23, 2009, 04:40 PM
 
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Oct 23, 2009, 04:47 PM
 
Unless Apple has been working on this file system for many years now in secret, this means that a new one is a *long* ways off.
     
goMac  (op)
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Oct 23, 2009, 04:49 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
Unless Apple has been working on this file system for many years now in secret, this means that a new one is a *long* ways off.
IIRC they've had an in house file system guy for a while, but I dunno what he's been working on.
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Oct 23, 2009, 04:50 PM
 
What's the rationale behind not using one of the several file systems that already exist (ReiserFS, ext3, etc)?
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besson3c
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Oct 23, 2009, 04:58 PM
 
Originally Posted by goMac View Post
IIRC they've had an in house file system guy for a while, but I dunno what he's been working on.
The BeOS guy?
     
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Oct 23, 2009, 04:58 PM
 
Originally Posted by shifuimam View Post
What's the rationale behind not using one of the several file systems that already exist (ReiserFS, ext3, etc)?
I'm pretty sure none of them are as capable as ZFS, and Apple might be leery of using something that is not corporately backed. If there are any patents, and they are the biggest company using the file system, they'd be the first target for lawsuits.
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Oct 23, 2009, 04:59 PM
 
Originally Posted by shifuimam View Post
What's the rationale behind not using one of the several file systems that already exist (ReiserFS, ext3, etc)?
They're GPL?
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Oct 23, 2009, 05:01 PM
 
Originally Posted by shifuimam View Post
What's the rationale behind not using one of the several file systems that already exist (ReiserFS, ext3, etc)?
Reiser: the guy that wrote it is in jail
ext3/ext4: ext4 is a stepping stone file system until btrfs is ready, and it may be GPL which I believe is incompatible with Apple
XFS: also GPL, I believe
     
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Oct 23, 2009, 05:08 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
The BeOS guy?
I miss BeOS.

(I never get sick of that demo video. Oh the possibilities. Near 100% increase in performance when adding a CPU... can you imagine the speed on dual, 8 core chip? No other OS can do that. None.)
( Last edited by olePigeon; Oct 23, 2009 at 05:38 PM. Reason: Don't know my percentiles. :P)
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goMac  (op)
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Oct 23, 2009, 05:22 PM
 
Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
I miss BeOS.

(I never get sick of that demo video. Oh the possibilities. Near 200% increase in performance when adding a CPU... can you imagine the speed on dual, 8 core chip? No other OS can do that. None.)
Sure, but speedups using multiple cores depends on the amount of threading in the software being run. BeOS may have optimized the software that came with the system, but no OS can just magically make all software run over multiple CPUs.
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Chuckit
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Oct 23, 2009, 05:29 PM
 
Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
I miss BeOS.

(I never get sick of that demo video. Oh the possibilities. Near 200% increase in performance when adding a CPU... can you imagine the speed on dual, 8 core chip? No other OS can do that. None.)
How on earth could adding a single CPU make the whole system run at three times the speed?
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Oct 23, 2009, 05:34 PM
 
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olePigeon
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Oct 23, 2009, 05:37 PM
 
Originally Posted by Chuckit View Post
How on earth could adding a single CPU make the whole system run at three times the speed?
Sorry, nearly 100%. (2x) Just watch the first video towards the end.
( Last edited by olePigeon; Oct 23, 2009 at 05:49 PM. )
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Oct 23, 2009, 05:44 PM
 
Originally Posted by goMac View Post
Sure, but speedups using multiple cores depends on the amount of threading in the software being run. BeOS may have optimized the software that came with the system, but no OS can just magically make all software run over multiple CPUs.
Correct. The beautiful thing about BeOS was that it was designed from the ground up to run on multiple processors. Multithreading was not a feature that was tacked on later, absolutely everything about the OS was designed for multi processor computing. This was in the 1990s!

Applications written for BeOS would take advantage of this. When they did, the performance was incredible (it was POISX compatible, so you could also run Linux and UNIX apps not optimized for BeOS.) I used BeOS pretty extensively in the 90s when I was volunteering. The difference between Windows 98 on 60MHz IBM Aptiva and BeOS was like night and day. Mind bogglingly fast.
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shifuimam
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Oct 23, 2009, 06:08 PM
 
I thought Apple was all about GPL...I've heard macheads go off about how "the entire TCP/IP stack is open source" and whatnot.

So what's so scary about a GPL file system?
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Oct 23, 2009, 06:51 PM
 
GPL != open source

Apple generally tries to avoid GPL in favor of less militantly anti-corporate licenses whenever possible. For example, the BSD and Apache licenses.
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Oct 23, 2009, 06:57 PM
 
Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
Correct. The beautiful thing about BeOS was that it was designed from the ground up to run on multiple processors. Multithreading was not a feature that was tacked on later, absolutely everything about the OS was designed for multi processor computing. This was in the 1990s!

Applications written for BeOS would take advantage of this. When they did, the performance was incredible (it was POISX compatible, so you could also run Linux and UNIX apps not optimized for BeOS.) I used BeOS pretty extensively in the 90s when I was volunteering. The difference between Windows 98 on 60MHz IBM Aptiva and BeOS was like night and day. Mind bogglingly fast.
Did you develop code? It's my understanding that writing software for BeOS was very complicated.
     
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Oct 23, 2009, 07:18 PM
 
Originally Posted by Atheist View Post
Did you develop code? It's my understanding that writing software for BeOS was very complicated.
Nooo, no, no. I'm too stupid to write code. But, yeah, writing for BeOS could be difficult. However, I bet if it had continued and the IDE was improved, I'm sure a lot of those hurdles could have been overcome relatively easily.
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Oct 23, 2009, 07:27 PM
 
You can try to kill the Zombie File System, but it keeps coming back (for your brains)....
     
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Oct 23, 2009, 07:42 PM
 
Damn! ZFS was such a good fit!
Originally Posted by shifuimam View Post
What's the rationale behind not using one of the several file systems that already exist (ReiserFS, ext3, etc)?
That's actually very simple: it's a licensing problem. Unless they want to run the necessary nooks and crannies in userland, someone who knows his bit explained to me that this would mean Apple needs to change the license of the kernel and many, many libraries to GPL. He claimed it would include Carbon and Cocoa. No way they'll do that.

ReiserFS: to my knowledge it's no longer actively developed since the main developer has been convicted of murdering his wife.
ext3: It's old, let it die (it's ext2 + journaling).
btrfs is still young -- and it has been released under the GPL (as all of the above).

There are not that many candidates actually:
FFS + soft updates: that's the old default file system of
HAMMER: that's an experimental distributed file system invented for DragonflyBSD
( Last edited by OreoCookie; Oct 23, 2009 at 07:51 PM. )
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Oct 23, 2009, 07:44 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
The BeOS guy?
To my knowledge, he's one of the engineers. At least was, that was long time ago.
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Oct 23, 2009, 07:48 PM
 
Originally Posted by OreoCookie View Post
That's actually very simple: it's a licensing problem. Unless they want to run the necessary nooks and crannies in userland, someone who knows his bit explained to me that this would mean Apple needs to change the license of the kernel and many, many libraries to GPL. He claimed it would include Carbon and Cocoa. No way they'll do that.
Oh, well that makes sense then.
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Oct 23, 2009, 08:11 PM
 
Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
Correct. The beautiful thing about BeOS was that it was designed from the ground up to run on multiple processors. Multithreading was not a feature that was tacked on later, absolutely everything about the OS was designed for multi processor computing. This was in the 1990s!
Hmm... if only Apple could rewrite their OS to include this feature at the low level. That would be GRAND. They could some kind of CENTRAL system for DISPATCHing units of work in applications.
     
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Oct 23, 2009, 08:16 PM
 
Originally Posted by hayesk View Post
Hmm... if only Apple could rewrite their OS to include this feature at the low level. That would be GRAND. They could some kind of CENTRAL system for DISPATCHing units of work in applications.
Yeah, only took them nearly 20 years.
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Oct 23, 2009, 10:58 PM
 
Wasnt Apple on the verge of buying BeOS before it went with Next ?

Anyway, back to file systems.... (im a software engineer)... all this talk of ZFS, WFS, and all the other exotic filesystems..... i have to ask....

Whats the gain ? Whats the ROI ? what's in it for the customer...would they even know or care ?

From the development perspective... what will it be able to offer that current systems dont ? i'll be the first to admit that im not up-to-date on the latest n greatest as far as file systems go, but i *think* the current filesystems cater to the requirements of their users just fine.... imo.
     
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Oct 23, 2009, 11:31 PM
 
Block level snapshots -> Faster and smaller Time Machine backups
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Oct 24, 2009, 12:35 AM
 
Originally Posted by Hawkeye_a View Post
Wasnt Apple on the verge of buying BeOS before it went with Next ?
Yes. Stupid Jean-Louis Gassée. He was quoted as saying he was going to milk Apple for every penny. This was after Apple offered Be $120 million for the company. Gassée said no. So Apple left and bought NeXT. After that, Microsoft killed Be off. Be was bought by Palm for $5 million. :/

Be did win their lawsuit against Microsoft, but fat load good it did since the company went out of business anyway. Microsoft doesn't have to compete with a dead company, even if MS "loses."
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Oct 24, 2009, 02:44 AM
 
Originally Posted by Hawkeye_a View Post
Wasnt Apple on the verge of buying BeOS before it went with Next ?

Anyway, back to file systems.... (im a software engineer)... all this talk of ZFS, WFS, and all the other exotic filesystems..... i have to ask....

Whats the gain ? Whats the ROI ? what's in it for the customer...would they even know or care ?

From the development perspective... what will it be able to offer that current systems dont ? i'll be the first to admit that im not up-to-date on the latest n greatest as far as file systems go, but i *think* the current filesystems cater to the requirements of their users just fine.... imo.

Many things:

- Improved performance
- The ability to offer sophisticated and easy-to-manage RAID configurations (which could actually be quite significant to Apple's future, IMHO)
- Better data integrity (the death of Disk Warrior)
- Resizable partitions (this might be handy with virtualization, better than sparse disk images which have some problems)
- Snapshots and clones
- Much faster block-level backups
- Uses less disk space
- File compression
- File encryption
- Better handling of metadata (which would be handy with something like Spotlight that instead maintains a separate database)
- Software RAID 5+ is now safe
- Some new filesystems such as BTRFS do live defragging

HFS is slow, corruption prone, and built on ancient legacy code. It is, in my opinion, easily the weakest aspect to OS X. File systems *do* make a significant difference, the users *will* notice the difference even if they don't use any of these features.
     
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Oct 24, 2009, 02:52 AM
 
I noticed a fairly significant performance improvement upgrading my home Linux system from ext3 to ext4, which was a relatively small upgrade. The difference between HFS+ and a file system like ZFS could literally be like the difference between Leopard and Snow Leopard in a single feature.

My understanding of HFS+ is that each write is sort like writing two files given its dual fork design. My understanding of ZFS is that the metadata is attached to each file and it is dynamic. Not only does this make writing faster, but it eliminates the whole Spotlight indexing to a separate database approach and moves things to a lower level, where it probably should be.
     
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Oct 24, 2009, 10:58 AM
 
ZFS is not GPL, BTW, it's CDDL:

ZFS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Isn't CDDL supposed to be compatible with the BSD license?
     
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Oct 24, 2009, 11:01 AM
 
Originally Posted by goMac View Post
Can't believe I beat Besson to the punch...

Apple Shuts Down Open Source ZFS Project - Mac Forums

Looks like it was a licensing issue. The good news is that Apple is hiring an in house team to write a new file system.

I'm starting to think that it isn't a licensing issue. DTrace is CDDL as well. I'm thinking that Apple wanted some sort of long term commitment with Sun and wanted them to help with OS X specific issues, and perhaps Sun wanted too much money or a commitment from Apple in helping develop it further, or something like that.
     
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Oct 24, 2009, 11:46 AM
 
I don't see much of a consensus... was ZFS dropped for technical or legal reasons?

Originally Posted by shifuimam View Post
What's the rationale behind not using one of the several file systems that already exist (ReiserFS, ext3, etc)?
Licensing, and they're not much better than HFS+.

Originally Posted by shifuimam View Post
I thought Apple was all about GPL...I've heard macheads go off about how "the entire TCP/IP stack is open source" and whatnot.
Absolutely not, Apple uses very little GPL software; the most prominent example I can think of is bits of WebKit are LGPL. The TCP/IP stack derived from BSD licensed code (which even Microsoft uses).
     
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Oct 24, 2009, 03:03 PM
 
Originally Posted by mduell View Post
Licensing, and they're not much better than HFS+.

I would argue that, but I would say that they aren't leaps and bounds better like ZFS is or like btrfs ought to be.
     
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Oct 24, 2009, 03:17 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
ZFS is not GPL, BTW, it's CDDL:

ZFS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Isn't CDDL supposed to be compatible with the BSD license?
I thought so as well.
It really seems to be either a licensing issue and/or concerns of Apple that Oracle will can ZFS although I find the latter unlikely). I'm surprised Apple doesn't just buy ZFS and be done with it.
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Oct 24, 2009, 11:01 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
I'm starting to think that it isn't a licensing issue. DTrace is CDDL as well. I'm thinking that Apple wanted some sort of long term commitment with Sun and wanted them to help with OS X specific issues, and perhaps Sun wanted too much money or a commitment from Apple in helping develop it further, or something like that.
The rumor mill says it's not the type of license, but more of a... Apple worried about software patents issue.

Supposedly ZFS was fully completed for 10.6 and yanked at the last minute, so it wasn't an engineering issue.
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Oct 25, 2009, 02:48 AM
 
Originally Posted by OreoCookie View Post
I thought so as well.
It really seems to be either a licensing issue and/or concerns of Apple that Oracle will can ZFS although I find the latter unlikely). I'm surprised Apple doesn't just buy ZFS and be done with it.
If it got canned by Oracle, wouldn’t Apple be able to continue developing it themselves? It is an open-source project, after all. Sure, it would become an Apple-specific thing rather than being truly cross-platform, but the alternative is Apple writing their own file system, which would have the same problem.

It’s gotta be the patent issue.

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Oct 25, 2009, 01:06 PM
 
[zfs-discuss] Apple cans ZFS project

Jeff Bonwick Jeff.Bonwick at sun.com
Sat Oct 24 14:35:25 PDT 2009

> Apple can currently just take the ZFS CDDL code and incorporate it
> (like they did with DTrace), but it may be that they wanted a "private
> license" from Sun (with appropriate technical support and
> indemnification), and the two entities couldn't come to mutually
> agreeable terms.

I cannot disclose details, but that is the essence of it.

Jeff
     
   
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