Apple Designs New File-System To Succeed HFS+

[k1e0x]

Your definition of "everything" is weird.

ZFS runs only on Unix.

Linux has an unofficial port of ZFS, Windows has jackshit even if it would be legal to make a ZFS driver for windows.

It needs a Posix compliant system. So anything that's posix compliant can in theory use it (So for instance ZFS on Haiku is probably possible if people want to do the work) It would be legal to make a ZFS windows driver, as the license isn't the problem the problem is windows isn't posix compliant. So you have code that is more legal to use on Windows than it is on Linux.. thus making my point about the GPL creating barriers for open source.

Now lets get real for a second here.. because ZFS on Linux isn't some kind of sketchy "unofficial port". ZoL is a participant to the OpenZFS Project the same as Illumos and FreeBSD. It is as mainline as the other two. The legalities of it are unknown because it depends if you define ZFS as a derivative work of Linux or not. Ubuntu and many other distros ship ZFS included now because ZFS is defined (quite properly) as a derivative work of Illumos. Clearly that is the case, can anyone argue that? So since that's true there is no licence incompatibility with the GPL. Will it be included in the kernel? No, but neither will a lot of other things that make up a running Linux system like glibc for instance and your kernel won't get much done without that. So in the end the "legal issues" on ZFS amount to fud.

It doesn't solve every problem but it is the best file system we have and it's miles ahead of anything a competing operating system has (: cough : NTFS). I don't understand why you wouldn't want to use this advantage you have and you know the Linux community would be wise to adopt it because there are things out there like FreeBSD and Illumos that ARE being used for containers that are a natural fit for ZFS. Illumos can even execute native Linux Docker containers and run them securely in a Zone (think FreeBSD Jail) on bare metal. So.. you know.. suit yourself.. you can sit around and talk about imaginary licence incompatibilities and lowering boot times with systemd while better designed operating systems run over Linux. : shrug :

[starshipeleven]

I think your interpretation is based on a cost/benefit analysis, which is fine, but unless you are making the same judgments of those values (and the actual value of those values) as apple, you can't really replicate their reasoning.

Apple is anything but unpredictable after Steve (our lord and saviour) died.

They aren't focusing on the it crowd (though, from my experience, a very large percentage of developers/engineers use apple hardware/software---they may not be it, but they are a highly technical audience), but that doesn't matter. What apple cares about is customer satisfaction (perhaps indirectly, but that is the effect we see).

They focus on people that have money and care about looks, which for the most part don't know a damn about IT, and may not even use OSX at all.
All data indicates that Apple hardware is selling like hot cakes and is outselling minor OEMs, while usage share of OSX is stationary, which means obviously one thing.
People install windows on them for a long list of reasons (they need to run programs and virtualizing isn't enough), and I can testify that. I lost the count on the apple laptops I had to install Windows on (natively, which is a bit more involved than using their crappy guided system).

Do you recall the rumors, from a number of years ago, about apple adopting zfs? My guess is...

... hilariously wrong since the rumour was clearly total bs.
ZFS is a huge monster that needs dozens of GB of ECC ram to run even relatively small arrays.
Also without AES acceleration (which is common now but not years ago) it kills the processor with checksum calculations.

ZFS was designed with large datacenter use in mind, where ECC RAM, processor power and AES acceleration are plentiful. It's NOT and I repeat NOT anywhere near suited for small-scale use.

The cost of development wouldn't necessarily be that large. Sun managed to develop, and deploy, ZFS in about 5 five years.

ZFS has some tradeoffs that simplified the development but made it more limited in scope, like assuming that RAM was ECC and plentiful, or that the arrays could not be changed easily.

btrfs which is the evolution of ZFS supposed to run in both small and big scale, and be flexible, isn't an easy beast to tame.

Apple's needs are of a flexible file system they can deploy on both mobile and PC, and with advanced features.

You're forgetting that apple has a huge chunk of the av market, and editing hd/4k video, in an intermediate format, takes up HUGE amounts of space (they literally use TBs for scratch space).
If it's a big operation, they are using a san, and then the fs doesn't matter, but the majority of av folks aren't working at those places, and they get by with local arrays attached through thunderbolt.

These local arrays can stay with HFS+ much longer since they don't need encryption nor are flash-based.

I'm referring to the impedance mismatch between the two OSs, here.

We are talking of a filesystem driver that would be shared between a mostly-posix OS (linux) and a posix OS (OSX)

It might be better, but I think you are overestimating the work delta between building a narrowly defined fs product, from scratch, and porting an unfinished fs from another os, and ensuring it meets their reliability expectations.

What they need isn't narrowly-defined, they need an all-purpose filesystem able to scale decently in their mobile and PC sector, while being flash friendly and other features. That's not easy as making a filesystem for just datacenters like ZFS.

F2FS isn't btrfs. btrfs is unfinished, f2fs is already usable as-is.

[starshipeleven]

It needs a Posix compliant system.

Techically speaking, only OSX is posix-compliant. Everyone else is "mostly" posix-compliant. (don't know about minor toy OS)

So you have code that is more legal to use on Windows than it is on Linux.. thus making my point about the GPL creating barriers for open source.

GPL isn't creating barriers, Linux existed before ZFS, so Sun could have used GPL-compatible licenses if they wanted to let people run ZFS on linux too.
Deliberate choice, Linux basically nuked Solaris and x86-64 ate most of the SPARC market, if they let ZFS go to Linux, they would have lost a major selling point.

So since that's true there is no licence incompatibility with the GPL.

Bullshit, it's not clearly stated anywhere, and this leaves open the door.
If someone decided to sue it could degenerate in a long drawn legal war and none on the Linux kernel side has any intention to risk that.

Distros can do whatever they want and take the risks (none in his right mind would sue Canonical, because they are the sockpuppet of MS... ah crap I said it, I wanted to say because they have never made a dime off linux, so apart from getting Shuttleworth as a sex slave they cannot really offer anyway in case they lost), but if Linux kernel gets targeted it's going to be a big fucking war as there are plenty of big interests on both sides.

So.. you know.. suit yourself.. you can sit around and talk about imaginary licence incompatibilities and lowering boot times with systemd while better designed operating systems run over Linux. : shrug :

"better designed operating systems" just because they have a license that is compatible with ZFS's? Really?

[unixfan2001]

starshipeleven

You might want to take your pills this fine morning.
Your crazy is showing through again.

[starshipeleven]

starshipeleven
You might want to take your pills this fine morning.
Your crazy is showing through again.

Let's not mix things up please.
In the other thread (you know which) I was just having some fun trolling permissive license trolls, sometimes I find funny to do that while sounding like a ravaging lunatic, but I assure you I'm just playing.

Here I'm pretty much just stating facts.

[pal666]

smitty3268 pal666 starshipeleven Thaodan bug77One, we don't know how long they've been working on this project. Given that it's apple, it could've been in the works for years, with a team of hundreds working around the clock

givet that it's apple, they will shove half-baked crap down customers throats, like applemaps. and make "you are holding it wrong" excuses

[pal666]

F2FS isn't btrfs. btrfs is unfinished, f2fs is already usable as-is.

btrfs as is is more usable than f2fs

[k1e0x]

Techically speaking, only OSX is posix-compliant. Everyone else is "mostly" posix-compliant. (don't know about minor toy OS)

GPL isn't creating barriers, Linux existed before ZFS, so Sun could have used GPL-compatible licenses if they wanted to let people run ZFS on linux too.
Deliberate choice, Linux basically nuked Solaris and x86-64 ate most of the SPARC market, if they let ZFS go to Linux, they would have lost a major selling point.

Bullshit, it's not clearly stated anywhere, and this leaves open the door.
If someone decided to sue it could degenerate in a long drawn legal war and none on the Linux kernel side has any intention to risk that.

Distros can do whatever they want and take the risks (none in his right mind would sue Canonical, because they are the sockpuppet of MS... ah crap I said it, I wanted to say because they have never made a dime off linux, so apart from getting Shuttleworth as a sex slave they cannot really offer anyway in case they lost), but if Linux kernel gets targeted it's going to be a big fucking war as there are plenty of big interests on both sides.

"better designed operating systems" just because they have a license that is compatible with ZFS's? Really?

Fud on man. Your only hurting Linux in the end. I want it to be good and I use Linux as a desktop (at least while a few distros like Gentoo still exist that I can stand) but I use FreeBSD when I want a real OS so I don't really care if you want to let Free*Desktop*.org decide your init system for you or hail high prophet Stallman and shoot yourself in the foot. : shrug :

[alien]

btrfs as is is more usable than f2fs

btrfs is only usable if you have plenty of space to keep enough of it empty.

I use it both on my laptop and I had it on my Jolla mobile phone, and I got fed up with its stupid handling of empty(or metadata) space. Whenever the volume is more than about 80-90% full it starts reporting disk full errors while df still reports multiple dozens of GB of free space, just beceuse it ends up using all its metadata.

Especially on the Jolla it was really bad, it ended up repeatedly bricking my phone after performing updates, and this is one of the main reasons why I actually stopped using my Jolla phone. I am a techie and I can recover it with the rebalance trick, but after a while I got sick of doing it so I gave it up entirely. But this would definitely be a showstopper for the Apple's userbase, unless they ship insane amounts of storage so that the volumes would never ever get nowhere near of being full.

[starshipeleven]

btrfs as is is more usable than f2fs

btrfs has the free space issue (due to it being a CoW filesystem, they still have not even placed some arbitrary "reserved space limits" like for example there are on ext2-3-4 for other reasons) and the fact that it isn't working beyond RAID1 (both big issues). Plus assorted hiccups.

f2fs is mostly feature-complete and relatively stable afaik.

Of course btrfs's features are orders of magnitude more and more complex than f2fs so that's not a surprise.

Fud on man.

No, I'm just explaining to you why the smart people in linux kernel decided to not merge it.

You know patent trolling, legal trolling, and so on? Unless something is CLEARLY STATED it can be an issue, sometimes even then it can be an issue. Oracle is known for its omnomnomnoms in these things too.

Your only hurting Linux in the end.

I can have ZFS on linux and it is production-grade, while the kernel project itself is safe from any legal trolling that would be a BIG issue.

ZFS is a very self-contained system by design, keeping it out-of-mainline isn't hurting its development.

Sooo... WTF are you saying again?

I want it to be good and I use Linux as a desktop (at least while a few distros like Gentoo still exist that I can stand) but I use FreeBSD when I want a real OS so I don't really care if you want to let Free*Desktop*.org decide your init system for you or hail high prophet Stallman and shoot yourself in the foot. : shrug :

Ah, it's a thinly disguised try to say BSDs are better. No they are not, end of story.