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I wish Apple and Oracle would have just sorted things out and made ZFS the main filesystem for the Mac. Way back in the day when they first designed Time Machi

I wish Apple and Oracle would have just sorted things out and made ZFS the main filesystem for the Mac. Way back in the day when they first designed Time Machine, it was supposed to just be a GUI for ZFS snapshots. How cool would it be if we had a great GUI for ZFS (snapshots, volume management, etc.). I could buy a new external disk, add it to a pool, have seamless storage expansion. It would be great. Ah, what could have been.

coconut08 3y ago
yeah imagine a world where you could use time machine to backup 500gb parallels volumes where only the diff was stored between snapshots rather than needing to back up the whole 500gb volume every single time.
- jedberg 3y ago
  Right, that would be nice wouldn't it? As a workaround, you can create a sparsevolume to store your parallels volume. Sparsevolumes are stores in bands, and only bands that change get backed up. It might be slightly more efficient.
  - coconut08 3y ago
    wow that sounds like an interesting solution!
mustache_kimono 3y ago
> How cool would it be if we had a great GUI for ZFS (snapshots, volume management, etc.). How cool would it be if we had a great TUI for ZFS... Live in the now: https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm
- SpecialistK 3y ago
  Now that's a smooth segue to self-promo. I respect it.
  - mustache_kimono 3y ago
    httm has been at 9XX GitHub stars for what seemed like forever! Time to get over that 1k hump. As a Rust project, it's something of a duty to hype and self-promote, and to troll C++, of course. So let it be known: If you're not using httm, you're not using modern ZFS. Or -- httm is the cppfront of ZFS utilities? Or -- httm is the 'auto' keyword for filesystems, but less confusing (to me)? I'll work on it.
xoa 3y ago
Yes, this will always depress me, and to me personally be one of the ultimate evils of the court invented idea of "software patents". I've used ZFS with Macs sicne 2011, but without Apple onboard it's never been as smooth as it should have been and has gotten more difficult in some respects. There was a small window where we might have had a really universal, really solid FS with great data guarantees and features. All sorts of things with OS could be so much better, trivial (and even automated) update rollbacks for example. Sigh :(. I hope zvols finally someday get some performance attention so that if nothing else running APFS (or any other OS of course) on top of one is a better experience.
- gjvc 3y ago
  1000x this. A universal filesystem for UNIX would have been a wonderful thing, and would have been the best legacy Sun could have left.
  - cromka 3y ago
    Would become so ubiquitous that I can see how Microsoft would even eventually add a native support for it, especially in the WSL era.
globular-toast 3y ago
TrueNAS? You can manage the volumes with a web UI. It has a thing you can enable for SMB shares that let you see the previous versions of files on Windows. Or perhaps I don't understand what you're after.
- jedberg 3y ago
  I'm looking for that kind of featureset for my root filesystem on MacOs. :/
Terretta 3y ago
> How cool would it be if we had a great GUI for ZFS (snapshots, volume management, etc.). I could buy a new external disk, add it to a pool, have seamless storage expansion. See QNAP HERO 5: https://www.qnap.com/static/landing/2021/quts-hero-5.0/en/index.html https://www.qnap.com/static/landing/2021/quts-hero-5.0/en/in... NAS Options: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/?conditions=4-3 https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/?conditions=4-3 // This was about MacOS, and yes, that would be cool. But QNAP is remarkably MacOS-friendly, including Thunderbolt and Time Machine support.
- jedberg 3y ago
  As far as I can tell I can't use that as my root filesystem, right?
- ksec 3y ago
  If you follow Qnap you may be aware of their security nightmare in recent years. And HERO OS is only available on the Enterprise range of NAS, not even Prosumer class NAS.
  - gliaskos 3y ago
    Something like TVS-h474 seems quite nice for a wide range of uses. I have TVS-h1288X and I am really happy with it, maybe it's a bit overkill for most. That said, I could not use zfs send from my prev fbsd server, there are some compat checks in QNAP's version. Used nfs to migrate from my decade++ old pool. Using Tailscale for access, they have QNAP builds on GH.
    - rincebrain 3y ago
      QNAP forked from OpenZFS a long time ago, before the ZoL project was renamed the canonical OpenZFS project IIRC, and has been reimplementing whatever they wanted for some time. So it's not just a check for check's sake, I would suspect in practice their send/recv is just completely incompatible at this point.
- rincebrain 3y ago
phs318u 3y ago
I had the same thoughts about Apple and (at the time) Sun, 15 years ago. https://macoverdrive.blogspot.com/2008/10/using-zfs-to-manage-your-vm-zoo.html https://macoverdrive.blogspot.com/2008/10/using-zfs-to-manag...
wkat4242 3y ago
Yeah I wonder if it was really caused by Jonathan Schwartz bragging to the media about it and pissing Steve Jobs off, as was rumoured at the time. Or if there was more behind it. I would certainly not put it past Jobs. While he had some genius qualities, his personality was pretty deeply flawed. But on the other hand I wonder if his sense for business would not have prevailed. If only Apple had absorbed sun instead of oracle, their legacy would have been better off. Of course it couldn't have been worse. Which also made me wonder, of course Jobs and Ellison were big friends so perhaps Jobs just left it for him to take? Oracle always wanted to get their hands on java obviously. Ps the whole ZFS on Mac adventure came a little after time machine was already in production. ZFS is indeed an amazing desktop filesystem. I'm using it now on FreeBSD, I moved away from Mac because it became ever more closed down. I wanted more control, not less.
- mekster 3y ago
  Not sure why you limit that to desktop. It's more important that server files can have an instant snapshot, compression and performant incremental backup to remote servers.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Because the discussion was about Mac and macOS doesn't have a server version anymore that's worth speaking about. But when all this happened they still did, yes.
- toyg 3y ago
  Apple buying Sun would have been a disaster. Oracle at least needed some (arguably most) of what Sun made - Apple did not and do not. Apple would have killed Java in half a second. They don't need it, it was built to do the opposite of what they want their tech to do. Same for Solaris, burdensome duplicate. As for all the desktop-oriented FOSS projects (OpenOffice, VirtualBox etc), they would not have just been killed - Apple would have viciously bullied anyone to preclude them from forking them. The stuff they'd keep (MySql, probably), they would have made osx-only, and then strangled them quietly after they got out of the server game. They would have ripped anything technologically interesting from the hardware divisions and then shut them down - because they were no match, in terms of supply efficiency and value, for the Apple equivalents; and anyway they were never seriously interested in the server space. Oracle did what Oracle does, and realistically the culture clash was never going to result in a smooth transition; but from a commercial perspective they kept around the best of what Sun was making (Java, servers) and largely let the community get on with the stuff they weren't interested in (if rebranded/forked). The only real crime they committed, IMHO, was trying too hard to make money from VirtualBox, effectively spooking the market; there is a different timeline where VBox ends up being what Docker became. But everything else was par for the course.
kalleboo 3y ago
> I could buy a new external disk, add it to a pool, have seamless storage expansion. You still can't do that with ZFS though, that's what this PR is for.
- postmodest 3y ago
  You can add devices as vdevs to a pool, though. You can't add disks to a vdev. (IIRC) It's no different to LVM in that aspect.
  - Lex-2008 3y ago
    IIRC, the pool is effectively RAID0 over vdevs: if any single vdev dies - whole pool dies. Do i remember this correctly? So if over the years I got, say, five disks of varying quality - I shouldn't add them to a pool as five individual vdevs :)
    - calcifer 3y ago
      > if any single vdev dies - whole pool dies. Do i remember this correctly? Yes, that's why you don't have single-disk vdevs.
    - kalleboo 3y ago
      Correct. I lied when I said you can't add single disks, I meant you shouldn't add single disks. It's not like e.g. Synology where you can add a single disk and it will expand your underlying RAID5/6 arrays
- yencabulator 3y ago
  Beware using ZFS with external disks: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/3461 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/3461
postmodest 3y ago
Apple wanted one FS across all devices and ZFS's ARC makes that less than useful in memory-starved phones (and base model Airs amirite?) ZFS's separate cache meant that the better choice was APFS. Once they got around to writing it. And on drives at least, TM backups ARE APFS snapshots.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  Basically every OS has a file cache and you can tune the ARC how you please
nortonham 3y ago
>How cool would it be if we had a great GUI for ZFS (snapshots, volume management, etc.) I believe that was something built into the file manager in OpenSolaris, and then into illumos OS's. OpenIndiana has it in their file manager within their themed MATE desktop environment.
voytec 3y ago
> How cool would it be if we had a great GUI for ZFS Not in workstation OS, maybe not "great" but tools like FreeNAS had ZFS GUI sorted out[1] pretty decently and user-friendly for some time. I've seen storage laymen set these up, learn on the go and not screw up. [1] https://windows-cdn.softpedia.com/screenshots/FreeNAS_1.jpg https://windows-cdn.softpedia.com/screenshots/FreeNAS_1.jpg [1] https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/9.3/freenas_storage.html https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/9.3/freenas_...
panick21_ 3y ago
ZFS was open source, Nothing was preventing Mac using ZFS. Just as they use DTrace. Its just Apple NIH.

coconut08 3y ago

yeah imagine a world where you could use time machine to backup 500gb parallels volumes where only the diff was stored between snapshots rather than needing to back up the whole 500gb volume every single time.

jedberg 3y ago
Right, that would be nice wouldn't it? As a workaround, you can create a sparsevolume to store your parallels volume. Sparsevolumes are stores in bands, and only bands that change get backed up. It might be slightly more efficient.
- coconut08 3y ago
  wow that sounds like an interesting solution!

mustache_kimono 3y ago

> How cool would it be if we had a great GUI for ZFS (snapshots, volume management, etc.). How cool would it be if we had a great TUI for ZFS... Live in the now: https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm

SpecialistK 3y ago
Now that's a smooth segue to self-promo. I respect it.
- mustache_kimono 3y ago
  httm has been at 9XX GitHub stars for what seemed like forever! Time to get over that 1k hump. As a Rust project, it's something of a duty to hype and self-promote, and to troll C++, of course. So let it be known: If you're not using httm, you're not using modern ZFS. Or -- httm is the cppfront of ZFS utilities? Or -- httm is the 'auto' keyword for filesystems, but less confusing (to me)? I'll work on it.

xoa 3y ago

Yes, this will always depress me, and to me personally be one of the ultimate evils of the court invented idea of "software patents". I've used ZFS with Macs sicne 2011, but without Apple onboard it's never been as smooth as it should have been and has gotten more difficult in some respects. There was a small window where we might have had a really universal, really solid FS with great data guarantees and features. All sorts of things with OS could be so much better, trivial (and even automated) update rollbacks for example. Sigh :(. I hope zvols finally someday get some performance attention so that if nothing else running APFS (or any other OS of course) on top of one is a better experience.

gjvc 3y ago
1000x this. A universal filesystem for UNIX would have been a wonderful thing, and would have been the best legacy Sun could have left.
- cromka 3y ago
  Would become so ubiquitous that I can see how Microsoft would even eventually add a native support for it, especially in the WSL era.

globular-toast 3y ago

TrueNAS? You can manage the volumes with a web UI. It has a thing you can enable for SMB shares that let you see the previous versions of files on Windows. Or perhaps I don't understand what you're after.

jedberg 3y ago
I'm looking for that kind of featureset for my root filesystem on MacOs. :/

Terretta 3y ago

> How cool would it be if we had a great GUI for ZFS (snapshots, volume management, etc.). I could buy a new external disk, add it to a pool, have seamless storage expansion. See QNAP HERO 5: https://www.qnap.com/static/landing/2021/quts-hero-5.0/en/index.html https://www.qnap.com/static/landing/2021/quts-hero-5.0/en/in... NAS Options: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/?conditions=4-3 https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/?conditions=4-3 // This was about MacOS, and yes, that would be cool. But QNAP is remarkably MacOS-friendly, including Thunderbolt and Time Machine support.

jedberg 3y ago
As far as I can tell I can't use that as my root filesystem, right?
ksec 3y ago
If you follow Qnap you may be aware of their security nightmare in recent years. And HERO OS is only available on the Enterprise range of NAS, not even Prosumer class NAS.
- gliaskos 3y ago
  Something like TVS-h474 seems quite nice for a wide range of uses. I have TVS-h1288X and I am really happy with it, maybe it's a bit overkill for most. That said, I could not use zfs send from my prev fbsd server, there are some compat checks in QNAP's version. Used nfs to migrate from my decade++ old pool. Using Tailscale for access, they have QNAP builds on GH.
  - rincebrain 3y ago
    QNAP forked from OpenZFS a long time ago, before the ZoL project was renamed the canonical OpenZFS project IIRC, and has been reimplementing whatever they wanted for some time. So it's not just a check for check's sake, I would suspect in practice their send/recv is just completely incompatible at this point.
rincebrain 3y ago

phs318u 3y ago

I had the same thoughts about Apple and (at the time) Sun, 15 years ago. https://macoverdrive.blogspot.com/2008/10/using-zfs-to-manage-your-vm-zoo.html https://macoverdrive.blogspot.com/2008/10/using-zfs-to-manag...

wkat4242 3y ago

Yeah I wonder if it was really caused by Jonathan Schwartz bragging to the media about it and pissing Steve Jobs off, as was rumoured at the time. Or if there was more behind it. I would certainly not put it past Jobs. While he had some genius qualities, his personality was pretty deeply flawed. But on the other hand I wonder if his sense for business would not have prevailed. If only Apple had absorbed sun instead of oracle, their legacy would have been better off. Of course it couldn't have been worse. Which also made me wonder, of course Jobs and Ellison were big friends so perhaps Jobs just left it for him to take? Oracle always wanted to get their hands on java obviously. Ps the whole ZFS on Mac adventure came a little after time machine was already in production. ZFS is indeed an amazing desktop filesystem. I'm using it now on FreeBSD, I moved away from Mac because it became ever more closed down. I wanted more control, not less.

mekster 3y ago
Not sure why you limit that to desktop. It's more important that server files can have an instant snapshot, compression and performant incremental backup to remote servers.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Because the discussion was about Mac and macOS doesn't have a server version anymore that's worth speaking about. But when all this happened they still did, yes.
toyg 3y ago
Apple buying Sun would have been a disaster. Oracle at least needed some (arguably most) of what Sun made - Apple did not and do not. Apple would have killed Java in half a second. They don't need it, it was built to do the opposite of what they want their tech to do. Same for Solaris, burdensome duplicate. As for all the desktop-oriented FOSS projects (OpenOffice, VirtualBox etc), they would not have just been killed - Apple would have viciously bullied anyone to preclude them from forking them. The stuff they'd keep (MySql, probably), they would have made osx-only, and then strangled them quietly after they got out of the server game. They would have ripped anything technologically interesting from the hardware divisions and then shut them down - because they were no match, in terms of supply efficiency and value, for the Apple equivalents; and anyway they were never seriously interested in the server space. Oracle did what Oracle does, and realistically the culture clash was never going to result in a smooth transition; but from a commercial perspective they kept around the best of what Sun was making (Java, servers) and largely let the community get on with the stuff they weren't interested in (if rebranded/forked). The only real crime they committed, IMHO, was trying too hard to make money from VirtualBox, effectively spooking the market; there is a different timeline where VBox ends up being what Docker became. But everything else was par for the course.

kalleboo 3y ago

> I could buy a new external disk, add it to a pool, have seamless storage expansion. You still can't do that with ZFS though, that's what this PR is for.

postmodest 3y ago
You can add devices as vdevs to a pool, though. You can't add disks to a vdev. (IIRC) It's no different to LVM in that aspect.
- Lex-2008 3y ago
  IIRC, the pool is effectively RAID0 over vdevs: if any single vdev dies - whole pool dies. Do i remember this correctly? So if over the years I got, say, five disks of varying quality - I shouldn't add them to a pool as five individual vdevs :)
  - calcifer 3y ago
    > if any single vdev dies - whole pool dies. Do i remember this correctly? Yes, that's why you don't have single-disk vdevs.
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    Correct. I lied when I said you can't add single disks, I meant you shouldn't add single disks. It's not like e.g. Synology where you can add a single disk and it will expand your underlying RAID5/6 arrays
yencabulator 3y ago
Beware using ZFS with external disks: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/3461 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/3461

postmodest 3y ago

Apple wanted one FS across all devices and ZFS's ARC makes that less than useful in memory-starved phones (and base model Airs amirite?) ZFS's separate cache meant that the better choice was APFS. Once they got around to writing it. And on drives at least, TM backups ARE APFS snapshots.

michaelmrose 3y ago
Basically every OS has a file cache and you can tune the ARC how you please

nortonham 3y ago

>How cool would it be if we had a great GUI for ZFS (snapshots, volume management, etc.) I believe that was something built into the file manager in OpenSolaris, and then into illumos OS's. OpenIndiana has it in their file manager within their themed MATE desktop environment.

voytec 3y ago

> How cool would it be if we had a great GUI for ZFS Not in workstation OS, maybe not "great" but tools like FreeNAS had ZFS GUI sorted out[1] pretty decently and user-friendly for some time. I've seen storage laymen set these up, learn on the go and not screw up. [1] https://windows-cdn.softpedia.com/screenshots/FreeNAS_1.jpg https://windows-cdn.softpedia.com/screenshots/FreeNAS_1.jpg [1] https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/9.3/freenas_storage.html https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/9.3/freenas_...

panick21_ 3y ago

ZFS was open source, Nothing was preventing Mac using ZFS. Just as they use DTrace. Its just Apple NIH.