3 ms·

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

by 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.

3 ms·

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

by exelius 12y ago

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.