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Scroll down for Linus' commentary. > "The true horrors of HFS+ are not in how it's not a great > filesystem, but in how it's actively designed to be a bad >

Scroll down for Linus' commentary. > "The true horrors of HFS+ are not in how it's not a great > filesystem, but in how it's actively designed to be a bad > filesystem by people who thought they had good ideas." There doesn't seem to be a way to deep link to comments in G+?

astrodust 12y ago
G+ is a train wreck for a number of reasons, this included. Yeah, he's not a fan of HFS+ at all. Wasn't the plan to move to ZFS prior to the Oracle acquisition of Sun? Hopefully that ends up back on track somehow.
- iwwr 12y ago
  Isn't there a problem with ZFS' memory footprint to be usable for desktop systems?
  - Malic 12y ago
    It seems there was a licensing problem using ZFS on OSX: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/10/apple-abandons-zfs-on-mac-os-x-project-over-licensing-issues/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/10/apple-abandons-zfs-on-m...
  - mindajar 12y ago
    ZFS works a lot better if you dedicate lots of memory to it, yes. Apple sells far more iOS devices than Macs these days, and the iOS filesystem is case-sensitive HFS+. It's hard to imagine Apple doing something new in filesystems that doesn't improve the platform they make the most money from. In a way, the same logic applies to Macs. The number of Macs that support multiple internal disks will soon be zero if it isn't already, so some of the best features of ZFS are irrelevant on new Apple computers.
    - stephenr 12y ago
      With thunderbolt ports on very Mac why should storage be limited to internal devices?
      - kstenerud 12y ago
        Because they want you on iCloud. You can't even install the OS without an Apple ID and an active internet connection anymore.
        nizmow 12y ago
        This is extremely false.
        kstenerud 12y ago
        Which part? The iCloud part or the OS install part? I just finished reinstalling Yosemite an hour ago after wiping the HD of a friend's new laptop. It would not allow me to get past the eligibility check until I logged in with a valid Apple ID.
        X-Istence 12y ago
        Your friend may have had Find my Mac turned on. At that point the only way to get an OS installed on it is to have the original apple ID it was turned on under.
        kstenerud 12y ago
        Nope. She never used it. It was the initial "determining the eligibility of this machine" phase where it asked me to log in (originally, this was to check that you'd indeed purchased OSX Lion, but the OS is "free" now). If "Find my Mac" is turned on, it won't even let you wipe the hard drive.
        12y ago
- exelius 12y ago
  ZFS on OS X was abandoned several years ago. Unless Apple has a new filesystem under development as a skunkworks project, HFS+ is the filesystem on OS X for the foreseeable future. And even if they did build a new FS, there are some assumptions like case insensitivity that likely couldn't be abandoned without potentially breaking backwards compatibility.
  - cmurf 12y ago
    And in effect ZFS is forked. There's openzfs and Oracle ZFS, so if Apple were to go with ZFS, which one would they pick? The smart choice would be openzfs which almost certainly means they end up licensing Oracle's ZFS at which point it's like, classic Apple - let's try whenever possible to make interoperability either difficult or hilarious. Apple's Core Storage does have some COW properties, so they could probably do something like linux LVM thin provisioning style snapshots. They could maybe add a tree for checksums, which would be a good idea for the journal at least but seeing as this hasn't been a priority for even just the journal, the most unencumbered and recent add-on, it seems obviously not a priority. The COW stuff was necessary to automagically migrate data from the SSD to the HDD in their so called "fusion drive", so maybe they leverage that for an updated version of Time Machine and could also do it for atomic online OS/software update with an optional later reboot rather than a mandatory one. One rather cool thing it does is on-the-fly encryption and decryption of an LV. You can even reboot in the middle of either conversion and it resumes where it left off. And those encrypted volumes can be resized (that's not well documented but is supported and is even used by their own Boot Camp Assistant). So about the limit of the new fs is an LVM like thing under journaled-HFS+/X.
- fubarred 12y ago
  Only if AAPL acquires/merges with ORCL. 3rd-party: there's the non-FUSE port https://openzfsonosx.org/ https://openzfsonosx.org/
- donavanm 12y ago
  Project predated oracle, back in the osx 10.5-10.6 days when there was the dtrace integration as well. There were internal builds of the zfs kext and at one point I saw leaked source on the Internet. Project was abandoned because of legals disagreements over cddl licensing, as I recall.
  - nobleach 12y ago
    It was in the dropdown list in Disk Utilities in Leopard developer betas. I never actually tried using it.
  - the_why_of_y 12y ago
    CDDL licensing? more likely NetApp scared Apple off with patent aggression http://en.swpat.org/wiki/NetApp%27s_filesystem_patents http://en.swpat.org/wiki/NetApp%27s_filesystem_patents

astrodust 12y ago

G+ is a train wreck for a number of reasons, this included. Yeah, he's not a fan of HFS+ at all. Wasn't the plan to move to ZFS prior to the Oracle acquisition of Sun? Hopefully that ends up back on track somehow.

iwwr 12y ago
Isn't there a problem with ZFS' memory footprint to be usable for desktop systems?
- Malic 12y ago
  It seems there was a licensing problem using ZFS on OSX: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/10/apple-abandons-zfs-on-mac-os-x-project-over-licensing-issues/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/10/apple-abandons-zfs-on-m...
- mindajar 12y ago
  ZFS works a lot better if you dedicate lots of memory to it, yes. Apple sells far more iOS devices than Macs these days, and the iOS filesystem is case-sensitive HFS+. It's hard to imagine Apple doing something new in filesystems that doesn't improve the platform they make the most money from. In a way, the same logic applies to Macs. The number of Macs that support multiple internal disks will soon be zero if it isn't already, so some of the best features of ZFS are irrelevant on new Apple computers.
  - stephenr 12y ago
    With thunderbolt ports on very Mac why should storage be limited to internal devices?
    - kstenerud 12y ago
      Because they want you on iCloud. You can't even install the OS without an Apple ID and an active internet connection anymore.
      - nizmow 12y ago
        This is extremely false.
        kstenerud 12y ago
        Which part? The iCloud part or the OS install part? I just finished reinstalling Yosemite an hour ago after wiping the HD of a friend's new laptop. It would not allow me to get past the eligibility check until I logged in with a valid Apple ID.
        X-Istence 12y ago
        Your friend may have had Find my Mac turned on. At that point the only way to get an OS installed on it is to have the original apple ID it was turned on under.
        kstenerud 12y ago
        Nope. She never used it. It was the initial "determining the eligibility of this machine" phase where it asked me to log in (originally, this was to check that you'd indeed purchased OSX Lion, but the OS is "free" now). If "Find my Mac" is turned on, it won't even let you wipe the hard drive.
        12y ago
exelius 12y ago
ZFS on OS X was abandoned several years ago. Unless Apple has a new filesystem under development as a skunkworks project, HFS+ is the filesystem on OS X for the foreseeable future. And even if they did build a new FS, there are some assumptions like case insensitivity that likely couldn't be abandoned without potentially breaking backwards compatibility.
- cmurf 12y ago
  And in effect ZFS is forked. There's openzfs and Oracle ZFS, so if Apple were to go with ZFS, which one would they pick? The smart choice would be openzfs which almost certainly means they end up licensing Oracle's ZFS at which point it's like, classic Apple - let's try whenever possible to make interoperability either difficult or hilarious. Apple's Core Storage does have some COW properties, so they could probably do something like linux LVM thin provisioning style snapshots. They could maybe add a tree for checksums, which would be a good idea for the journal at least but seeing as this hasn't been a priority for even just the journal, the most unencumbered and recent add-on, it seems obviously not a priority. The COW stuff was necessary to automagically migrate data from the SSD to the HDD in their so called "fusion drive", so maybe they leverage that for an updated version of Time Machine and could also do it for atomic online OS/software update with an optional later reboot rather than a mandatory one. One rather cool thing it does is on-the-fly encryption and decryption of an LV. You can even reboot in the middle of either conversion and it resumes where it left off. And those encrypted volumes can be resized (that's not well documented but is supported and is even used by their own Boot Camp Assistant). So about the limit of the new fs is an LVM like thing under journaled-HFS+/X.
fubarred 12y ago
Only if AAPL acquires/merges with ORCL. 3rd-party: there's the non-FUSE port https://openzfsonosx.org/ https://openzfsonosx.org/
donavanm 12y ago
Project predated oracle, back in the osx 10.5-10.6 days when there was the dtrace integration as well. There were internal builds of the zfs kext and at one point I saw leaked source on the Internet. Project was abandoned because of legals disagreements over cddl licensing, as I recall.
- nobleach 12y ago
  It was in the dropdown list in Disk Utilities in Leopard developer betas. I never actually tried using it.
- the_why_of_y 12y ago
  CDDL licensing? more likely NetApp scared Apple off with patent aggression http://en.swpat.org/wiki/NetApp%27s_filesystem_patents http://en.swpat.org/wiki/NetApp%27s_filesystem_patents