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While I am happy that Apple have at last committed to replacing HFS+, I'm wondering why they didn't use ZFS rather than reinventing the wheel. It's not like it
by rleigh 10y ago
While I am happy that Apple have at last committed to replacing HFS+, I'm wondering why they didn't use ZFS rather than reinventing the wheel. It's not like it's a particularly easy wheel to reinvent either; the amount of effort which goes into a filesystem like ZFS is non-trivial. Why not build on top of that?
I would have greatly appreciated being able to use ZFS with MacOS X, for datasets, snapshots, sending them to remote pools for backup etc. It would have made it directly interoperable with a lot of pre-existing and cross-platform infrastructure. (I couldn't care less if it didn't scale down to the "watch". Filesystems are not a one-size-fits-all affair.) I find it great that I can take a set of disks from e.g. Linux, run "zpool export", pull them out, and then shovel them into a FreeBSD system, run "zpool import" and have the pool and datasets reassembled and automatically mounted. Perfectly transparent interoperability and portability. While Apple like to do their own thing, this is one place I would have definitely appreciated some down to earth pragmatism and re-use of existing battle-tested and widely used technology.
- wcummings 10y agoHow does AAPL feel about the CDDL?
- wstrange 10y agoGiven that there are other companies shipping ZFS without Oracle's blessing, I am curious why Apple could not do the same? (honest question) Is it that Apple is a much bigger target? Patent issues?
- zaphar 10y agoMany of those companies probably started using ZFS before Oracle acquired Sun. After Oracle acquired Sun the risks of using ZFS skyrocketed legally and Apple had the option of just not taking on that risk since they hadn't shipped it yet. Given what we know about Oracle that was probably the right call.
- jdub 10y agoThey ship dtrace.
- rcoder 10y agoI think the barriers to getting ZFS into OS-X were probably legal, not technical ones. There's long history of the CDDL tripping up reasonable attempts to use ZFS and I doubt Apple would have wanted to proceed without approval and/or alternate licensing. Likewise Oracle has no real reason to let them do that without writing a check with lots of zeros on it. There's also a decent chunk of what ZFS supports (particularly flexible volume pool management) that would be useless on almost every machine that Apple makes and sells. Your example of pulling a drive out of one machine and putting it in another is either impossible (soldered-on storage) or highly unlikely (user-serviceable SSD, but hidden behind a bunch of pentalobe screws) with their modern hardware lineup.
- paride5745 10y agoApple should have bought Sun at the time, and cross-pollinate Mac OS X and Solaris while using OpenSolaris to attack the server/cloud market.
- NEDM64 10y agoIf Apple bought every single company that people say that "Apple should buy X", it would be no company left on Earth besides Apple.