Open ZFS File-System Running On Windows

[phoenix_rizzen]

Wait, what? Wasn't ReFS supposed to be the replacement for NTFS?

Then again Microsoft has under it's current leadership made habit of dropping things that they've put a lot of time and money into (Windows Phone and Nokia's old smartphone division being the prime examples) so I probably shouldn't have been surprised at all by this.

There have been a couple of attempts to "replace" NTFS by Microsoft. None have really gone anywhere. ReFS doesn't really make sense as a local/desktop filesystem, but it does have a nice featureset for a fileserver. They've removed it from the W10 Pro SKU, moving it to the new W10 Workstation SKU. W10 Pro is slowly turning into Home Ultimate.

[fithisux]

Reactos seems a possible target

[starshipeleven]

They've removed it from the W10 Pro SKU, moving it to the new W10 Workstation SKU. W10 Pro is slowly turning into Home Ultimate.

People here is still wondering about what kinds of reasoning brought them to make a "Server Lite" W10 and call it "Workstation".

I mean, who the fuck needs ReFS, NVDIMM (persistent RAM), 4 CPUs on the same board, and 6 TB of RAM in a workstation? That's not a workstation man. It's a mid-size server.

The only workstation-y feature is the RDMA support (for 10Gbit networking).

I'm surely interested in it though, especially if they have OEM licenses for that, I'm gonna be rocking it on my laptop for sure if they do.

W10 Pro is slowly turning into Home Ultimate.

Nah, Pro has always been a "corporate office version of Home", ReFS was not exactly top priority.

Still, I don't like this feature removal from launched products. NOT AT ALL.

[profoundWHALE]

Wait, what? Wasn't ReFS supposed to be the replacement for NTFS?

ReFS is not really good for desktop use. It has a specific use cases (databases, servers, etc) and that's it.

[k1e0x]

I don't understand what Oracle has to do with OpenZFS.. Oracle could open up their version of ZFS.. but who would even want it? Oracle's version sucks and it's way behind OpenZFS. I really don't see these projects getting back together.

[nils_]

I don't understand what Oracle has to do with OpenZFS.. Oracle could open up their version of ZFS.. but who would even want it? Oracle's version sucks and it's way behind OpenZFS. I really don't see these projects getting back together.

OpenZFS contains a lot of code contributed by Oracle under the terms of their license which is incompatible with the GPL. The same license therefore also applies to OpenZFS, with the added problem that copyright is spread out between a lot of contributors who would have to agree to a change in license.

[k1e0x]

OpenZFS contains a lot of code contributed by Oracle under the terms of their license which is incompatible with the GPL. The same license therefore also applies to OpenZFS, with the added problem that copyright is spread out between a lot of contributors who would have to agree to a change in license.

Yeah pretty concise lay of the licence land for it. As far as Oracle as a controlling body is concerned they don't have an open source version of ZFS and don't control OpenZFS (that would lie with the contributors of Illumos, FreeBSD and ZoL). I think Oracle is starting to wake up and realize what they have.. and that can't be good.

I wonder how the Linux people feel about OpenZFS in Windows. It's been a feather in the cap if Linux/Unix for some time now but they haven't embraced it and they are loosing that advantage over Microsoft now.

[aht0]

MS could simply block OpenZFS with the expedient of making use of unsigned drivers impossible. Even at the moment, using unsigned drivers is pita.

[name99]

License wise, I think it might be easier to have ZFS on Windows than Linux. I think this is interesting. I still can't believe that Windows and MacOS don't have checksum metadata as basic requirements for their FS. And I'm not talking CRC. How is it that we still treat digital data as a basic sheet of paper? ZFS and BTRFS aren't advanced FS, they are basic FS. My first job out of university, I was an actuary for a pension fund. We had all (paper) files in quintuplicate (5 copies, not 15), with the 4 extras send at different archive places. Because 40-50 years from now, we might need the actual original agreements and proof of signatures.

Data space is cheap, I don't know why we haven't adopted such measures for our everyday data.

It's not quite clear from your phrasing ("I still can't believe that Windows and MacOS don't have checksum metadata as basic requirements for their FS") what you mean, but to clarify, APFS DOES have checksumming over the FS metadata, but NOT over user data.

This is obviously not ideal. MY GUESS (and this is only a guess) is that it's a transitional issue.
One problem with user data checksumming is where to store the checksums. (This is not an issue for metadata checksums because you can set the size of each metadata structure as you like). If you control hardware, then you can add extra padding to each disk sector or flash page to hold a checksum. (And of course such padding exists and is used, at the HW level, but Apple can't ask for that padding to be made larger.)
Otherwise you have to store the checksum somewhere else on the storage device and that presents performance problems. In particular it means that writes will be generating writes to two places (data and checksum) and you have to wait for both of those to reach persistence before the write can return. If you're ZFS and targeting huge arrays, this is likely not an issue. If you're Apple and targeting single disks, it is an issue --- obviously for HDs, but even for SSDs because of the suckiness of writes on SSDs. You can punt and not force the checksum writes to disk at the same time as the user data writes --- but then what's the point? If you're not ordering writes carefully and enforcing ACID, you've already decided you don't care THAT MUCH about safety...

So Apple is (right now) screwed because of HW limitations. Likewise for MS. How does ZFS do it?
There is something about this here

https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/zfs-end-to-end-data-integrity

with some pictures here

http://wiki.lustre.org/images/0/00/Tuesday_shpc-2009-zfs.pdf

and I have to admit the idea is VERY nice! So nice that I fear it is patented, and Apple and MS can't use anything similar unless they want to pay Oracle a whole lot of money :-(
Also what are the performance implications on a single commodity drive?
The claim here

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/single-drive-zfs.35515/

(I have no idea as to its truth) is that ZFS on a single drive is ridiculously dangerous. Basically it's optimized for a very different use case, so while one can consider trying to use some of its most clever features when targeting a single drive FS, the way to do so is not completely obvious.

Like I say, my guess is that the long term Apple plan is to provide HW without those limitations. This might take the form of using flash that's been engineered to provide some extra storage space. (Being part of the Toshiba acquisition group could help with that...) Or it might take the form of APFS being engineered mainly for nvRAM, with the flash and HD forms as transitional and the full set of ideas optimized for nvRAM. This may seem a stretch, but Apple says, for example, that APFS uses a "novel copy-on-write metadata scheme", and these sorts of novel schemes are part of the thinking around nvRAM and the way its byte addressability allows for different types of data structures.

(If you read about experiences with ReFS on the desktop, you see the same sorts of issues. For example ReFS is SUBSTANTIALLY slower than NTFS [like less than half the write speed] on a single spindle, presumably because of how it stores integrity data.)

[k1e0x]

ZFS is fine on a single drive pretty much. I believe it does copies=3 for it's uber block so it can correct itself in some situations but data lost will be data lost like any other FS. In some ways it can fail gracefully as opposed to other FS because it will know it's bad instead of just sending you corrupt files silently. So at least it can tell you to restore your backup.