The state of ZFS in the latest Snow Leopard seed
posted February 14th, 2009Since there will be no new zfs version for Leopard (the apple developers decided not to split their work because they needed to do changes in the kernel) we were interested what the state of zfs in snow leopard is.
The latest beta version for leopard was 119. The version in snow leopard 10a222 was 130 and in 10a261 it is 145.
Version 119 still had several problems with unmounting volumes, deleting the trash and with spotlight. All these bugs were fixed in version 145.
There even is some support in Disk Utility now. You can’t create pools but you see the slices of the pool and the pool itself.
The internal zfs version still is 8 and every pool created has version 6. OpenSolaris is up to version 14.
Interestingly the zfs.kext is NOT made for PPC, but only for x86 and x86_64 while rest of the system is made for all three architectures.
And don’t get fooled by people saying zfs is not really useful for normal users. Even when you are not using raid/mirror features or snapshots you get a filesystem which tells you when there is corruption in your files and the filesystem itself never (at least that’s what they promise) gets corrupted. That alone makes me totally happy even if I personally will use all the other features too!
February 16th, 2009 at 1:48 am
But I have heard that ZFS is only going to be shipped with Snow Leopard Server, is this true?
February 16th, 2009 at 2:43 am
An important feature for end users is snapshotting. In theory some of the incremental backup features currently offered by Time Machine could be provided through ZFS.
As I understand it, ZFS has another benefit for users, and especially expert users and developers: the ability to much more flexibly manage volumes; with ZFS, you can create, resize, merge or destroy volumes on a per-need basis.
For example, if you’re working on a sensitive project, in theory you could create an encrypted volume and mount it under ~/MySecretProject; unlike Leopard’s FileVault, the overhead of encryption would only be incurred for that one folder. (Of course, encryption is currently in beta on OpenSolaris.) Or if you’re working on a development project that involves lots of large datasets, you could store them all on a compressed volume.
February 16th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Alexander, you can do that today using encrypted and/or compressed disk images.
February 24th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
I don’t understand this post because I’ve just created a pool (on User not Server) on an MTRON Mobi 3500 I’ve got here and my biggest issue is figuring out hot to create a ZIL — also does nayone know whether there is a way to upgrade pools to v8?
June 5th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
I have a question about installing a torrented OS and I can’t figure it out for the life of me. I’m trying to contact someone who may be able to help? If someone can, PLEASSSSE please please e-mail me. My e-mail is Shayendemirel@hotmail.com. I’ve been trying this for a week now, literally. Please help me if you can!
December 26th, 2009 at 5:11 am
thats completely illegal…. unless its the torrent link of ubuntu or fedora
December 26th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
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