Some of the features you're talking about are clearly aspects of
OpenSolaris. For instance, the automounting stuff? That's not a
filesystem-layer activity. That's an OS layer activity that interacts
with various filesystems. (For instance, the ext2 family of filesystems
(including ext3 and ext4) have the capacity to store their mount
point in the metadata, and as such it would be possible to write an
automounter that mounts them without an fstab file.)
ZFS does have a lot of features, it is true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
I suspect that a number of the "attention to fine detail" aspects of it
may well be integrated deeply within the OS itself -- and not inherant
aspects of ZFS.
The whole "incompatible with the GPL as used in the Linux kernel" thing
makes it less interesting to me.
It's like saying BeOS has really great (that is low) audio latency.
It does me no good, as I'm not going to actually use BeOS. I may as
well wait for a free software guy to adapt features in to a system I
can actually use. (Unless, say, they can't do that because they're all
patented...)
I have more interest in the Hurd than I do in OpenSolaris. Jumping
between Linux distributions is minor work compared to going between
entirely different operating systems. (If I get the Debian distribution
of the Hurd the only big thing different would be the kernel.)
Side note: Even though the Hurd isn't done yet, the upcoming release of
Debian (codename: Squeeze) will include kFreeBSD as a core supported
architecture. (For the folks unaware, it'll be Debian but with the
FreeBSD kernel instead of the Linux kernel.)
Solaris, in particular, is like an odd cousin with funny coloured hair
and a weird accent when compared to Linux. They grew up in totally
different places, and different underlying decisions were made so long
ago that neither family even remembers that it was once a decision.
Cheers,
Steven Black
On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 09:06:57PM -0500, Joe Auty wrote:
> I've been testing and evaluating ZFS over the last several days, and
> I've been thoroughly impressed. ZFS is one of those products where there
> is so much attention to little details that it is literally a joy to
> use. This is Sun's masterpiece!
>
> I'm only testing ZFS in an OpenSolaris VM for now so I can't report
> really back on performance and resource consumption, but from what I can
> gather there are a lot of people who consider ZFS to be highly stable,
> some companies and universities using it on production servers, and as
> you know it is the default file system in OpenSolaris. That being said,
> here is why I've been so impressed with it...
>
> ZFS seems to sort of combine LVM and hardware RAID into a single
> product. It even includes a mini-NFS and iSCSI client for very easy file
> system sharing, it will automount all of your file sytems at boot so
> that you don't have to much around with the Solaris equivalent to fstab,
> and the interface is very thoughtful and easy-to-use with so many little
> thoughtful features and little touches that make life easy. In fact, it
> is so straight forward that it would be very easy to wrap a
> configuration GUI around, I think, and hence the subject of this message...
>
> One of the biggest problems with consumer PCs are the fact that the
> machine is dependent on a single disk which are prone to going bad.
> Given the availability of high capacity 2.5" SATA disks and Flash
> increasing in capacity and reducing in size constantly, isn't it only a
> matter of time before it makes sense to ship computers (even laptops)
> with multiple disks? It is so incredibly easy to setup a mirror of your
> filesystem in ZFS, and with a hot spare in your storage pool you can
> automatically set it up to failover and notify you. Perhaps someday
> storage in a PC will be as simple as it is with a digital camera or
> something? I don't see how this sort of thing would be that far off...
>
> The other incredibly nice feature of ZFS that is a huge net gain for
> almost all of us is its snapshot ability. Snapshots are block level,
> meaning that whenever a file is changed you don't need to keep a
> complete copy of that file, a mess of hard links and all of that sort of
> stuff you'd find in a solution such as Apple's Time Machine or many of
> the backup snapshot solutions we concoct with shell scripts. Taking
> snapshots is *incredibly fast*, incredibly easy to manage, and you can
> browse these snapshots without having to create new inodes and hard
> links - these are, as I understand it, simply very low level references
> to files, but not files themselves. Still, you can copy individual files
> from snapshots as you would copy any file, or restore an entire file
> system from a snapshot. This is so easy to do and takes up so little
> disk space that not only is this a great way to do backups, but it is
> also a great way to create yourself an "oh shit" safety net should you
> want to back out of an update that has gone bad, etc.
>
> I could go on about the many features and nice aspects to using ZFS,
> features like self healing, zpool iostat, etc. It's pretty cool stuff,
> but I'll leave my gushing for another time. Like I said, I'm just
> speaking to the features here...
>
> Still, I wanted to see what you guys thought about the future of modern
> file systems such as ZFS? I realize that it will be a long time before
> BTRFS is ready, perhaps even longer for this sort of thing to make its
> way to OS X and/or Windows, but now that the bar as been set I'm sure it
> is only a matter of time before the copycats emerge. However things end
> up, who owns what, licenses, product names, etc. This seems like a very
> big deal to me. It is definitely changing the way I think of my data,
> and I'm surprised how easy it is to setup a storage appliance like the
> one I'm testing.
>
> OpenSolaris is actually pretty nice. There are a few proprietary Sun
> things included, but a lot of it seems pretty familiar to me - bash,
> Gnome, etc. I would say that if you are looking for a storage solution
> that OpenSolaris shouldn't really be a deterrent. FreeBSD 8 is in RC3,
> and it will include full ZFS support (previous versions include partial
> support), so this is another option.
>
> Any other ZFS users/enthusiasts here?
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Joe Auty
> NetMusician: web publishing software for musicians
> http://www.netmusician.org
> joe@netmusician.org
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