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Sun Microsystems

Sun Releases ZFS 47

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the still-can't-beat-the-circular-filing-system dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Sun's engineers have been blogging today that Sun has finally released its next generation filesystem, ZFS today by pushing out the "community" (i.e. testing) build 27 of OpenSolaris in source and binary form. There is also documentation and a a source code tour available on their site."
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Sun Releases ZFS More

Sun Releases ZFS

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  • I must say some of the things here are absolutely cool.. the scrubber etc... I am curious if this FS will ever be available to Linux or BSD based distros, or if licensing will keep it tied to Solaris/OpenSolaris.

    • Re:cool.. (Score:3, Informative)

      by aztracker1 ( 702135 )
      answered my own question... cool.

      From OpenSolaris License
      3.6. Larger Works. You may create a Larger Work by combining Covered Software with other code not governed by the terms of this License and distribute the Larger Work as a single product. In such a case, You must make sure the requirements of this License are fulfilled for the Covered Software.

    • Re:cool.. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mnmn ( 145599 )
      I cant wait to see it in BSD. Linux would be cool too, but it already has XFS, ReiserFS and other advanced filesystems. I'm not even sure if theyre in the same class of filesystems. I just feel like in a corner with BSD's currently limited selection.

      Sometime in the future we'll have one kernel, where we can swap in and out any driver, scheduler, filesystem, device etc from Linux, BSD or Solaris, and compile it as a monolith or micro kernel.
      • Agreed on that... I like BSD a lot, favorite is PC-BSD which makes it really nice for desktop use. Having a diverse, capable filesystem would be exceedingly nice. Would really like to see a DBFS that's based around this.. imo that's the next step for desktop OSes, with things like Google Desktop and Beagle getting a lot of response, and Vista's search, I think that having functionality inherent to the FS would be a good move... this FS has some really nice features moving forward though.
      • I just feel like in a corner with BSD's currently limited selection.

        One of the benefits of that is you get to avoid pissing contests such as the particularly nasty one between the VM subsystem hackers and Reiser & co. on LKML. Talk about miscommunication...

      • Re:cool.. (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        What nonsense. Have you ever even compiled a kernel?

        Do you realise how long the HURD guys have been trying to get just one microkernel running flexibly and effectively? (allbeit a highly ambitious one...)

        The only way to do what you describe would be to abstract everything to the degree that all your runtime dissappears into maintaining that abstraction. Oh, wait, I already mentioned HURD didn't I? ;-)

  • ZFS with DTrace are serious arguments for Solaris (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kompiluj ( 677438 ) on Wednesday November 16, 2005 @04:53PM (#14047543)
    About two years ago Solaris seemed doomed. Linux with the advent of 2.6 kernel started to be a real enterprise level contender. Now with ZFS and DTrace Solaris (and Open Source licencse) looks to be a real contender.

  • I'm astounded (Score:4, Insightful)

    by turgid ( 580780 ) on Wednesday November 16, 2005 @05:01PM (#14047627) Journal

    This is incredibly good news for Sun, and yet another astounding achievement this year.

    They open-sourced Solaris (despite the whinging of the nay-sayers and accusations of being in bed with SCO^H^H^HCaldera), they sell Opteron workstations and servers running 64-bit Solaris, 8-core 32-thread Niagara (aka UltraSPARC T1) came out early (the first Sun processor to do so this decade) and now they've pushed out ZFS - the best filesystem ever devised.

    If only they can get Project Janus integrated and out in the open...

  • Demo (Score:4, Informative)

    by ValiantSoul ( 801152 ) on Wednesday November 16, 2005 @05:05PM (#14047663)
    Watch a demo of it here: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/demos/ basics/ [opensolaris.org]
    They create 100 file systems in 20 seconds! Amazing!
  • Check out the demo, too. We live in exciting times!

  • Impressive (Score:5, Informative)

    by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 ) on Wednesday November 16, 2005 @05:19PM (#14047782) Homepage Journal
    I'm impressed. Some real innovation in filesystems, and coming from a company some considered to be sinking.

    I love:

    ``ZFS presents a pooled storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions''

    As far as I understand it, there is no need to decide in advance how large your filesystems are going to be. Simply make all your disks one large ZFS pool, then create your filesystems (/, /usr, /home, you know the drill), and each one will use as much space as it actually needs. I suppose you can still have / read-only, /home read-write, etc.

    ``All operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid.''

    And that seems to go not just for the directory structure, but for the file contents, too.

    ``ZFS provides unlimited constant-time snapshots and clones.''

    Another killer. Clones (writable copies, only the differences stored) are incredibly useful.

    ``There are no arbitrary limits in ZFS. ... full 64-bit file offsets''

    Heh. I guess 64-bit isn't arbitrary anymore? /smug-lisp-weenie-mode

    I wonder about:

    ``if you enable compression on a swap volume, you now have compressed virtual memory.''

    How about encrypted virtual memory?

    Finally, I'm curious to see how this will stack up against Reiser4 in terms of features, performance, and everything.
    • Some real innovation in filesystems

      Well, somewhat. There was a time once upon a time when mainframes used pooled storage....

      • Re:Impressive (Score:3, Interesting)

        by illumin8 ( 148082 )
        Hehe... Funny that you would post the one comment that was sort of ... "meh..." ... in a Sun discussion.

        Have you played with Sol10/ZFS yet? I just got a new job and I've just convinced the CIO to purchase a bunch of X2100/4100s... w00t!

        Anyway, they were set to make HP with Redhat the corporate standard but HP came in at 2x the price!

        I hope this works out... cross whatever you've got two of for me...
        • I like Solaris 10, and I've come to like SMF a lot, but I haven't played with ZFS yet. I just find everyone crowing about ZFS being so groundbreaking to be a bit silly. It's something that we certainly can use in the Unix world :-)
    • One benefit of partition-bound filesystems vs pooled filesystems is that a "runaway" filesystem that fills unexpectedly can't choke a separate filesystem. For example, if a runaway process writing to a /usr partition fills it, that doesn't fill the space the / filesystem needs to operate (and to fix the problem, like allowing logins). A pool would allow the /usr expansion to suck up all the oxygen in /.

      • Re:Impressive (Score:3, Informative)

        by Electrum ( 94638 )
        One benefit of partition-bound filesystems vs pooled filesystems is that a "runaway" filesystem that fills unexpectedly can't choke a separate filesystem.

        You can limit the size of a ZFS filesystem (partition) to avoid the problem you describe. But when when you really do need more space, you're not limited by the initial partition size. Being able to resize partitions is very useful.
    • How wil the volume thing, differ from just having a single volume called /, and then having /usr and /home
      be normal directories?
      • You have a much better control over them, you can span them seamlessly over multiple drives (including adding drives to already existing volumes), you can set precise sizes/quotas AND can redefine them to your heart's content whenever required in a single command (which is something you can't do with "physical" partitions)

  • Some links (Score:5, Informative)

    by ChrisRijk ( 1818 ) on Wednesday November 16, 2005 @05:44PM (#14047959)
    Man pages and a PDF slide show convering of the more interesting points:
    http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/ [opensolaris.org]
    (ZFS itself has just two commands btw)

    Some basic UFS vs ZFS benchmarks:
    http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/roch?entry=zfs_to _ufs_performance_comparison [sun.com]
    (I guess we'll have to wait and see if ZFS can beat UFS on all benchmarks by the time it ships with Solaris proper)

    Party trick - silently recovering forced data corruption:
    http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/timc?entry=demons trating_zfs_self_healing [sun.com]

    A user example of how ZFS's built-in error detection and correction can find hardware errors:
    http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/elowe?entry=zfs_s aves_the_day_ta [sun.com]

    Some background on RAS in file-systems:
    http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/relling?entry=zfs _from_a_ras_point [sun.com]

    ZFS vs Veritas for simplicity:
    http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/timf?entry=zfs_is _that_it [sun.com]

    You can config ZFS from a browser too if you want:
    http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/talley?entry=mana ge_zfs_from_your_browser [sun.com]

    How to trash your OSs with benchmarks:
    http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bill?entry=zfs_vs _the_benchmark [sun.com]

    Can't yet be used as the boot file-system, but it's being worked on:
    http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/tabriz?entry=zfs_ boot [sun.com]
  • According to this item [sun.com], ZFS has been around since Feb 04. I think the only thing new here is that it's been added to OpenSolaris.

    The feature set for ZFS is certainly way cool. But I'm disturbed by the lack of emphasis on reliability. I've had nasty experiences with older Sun filesystems that didn't that didn't respond robustly to sudden loss of power. (Yes, there was a UPS. It's a long story.) By contrast, I've seen journalling file systems like XFS and NTFS simply laugh off that kind of problem.

    OK, may

  • Why the hell isn't this on the front page?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mungtor ( 306258 ) on Wednesday November 16, 2005 @11:18PM (#14049749)
    Sun releases a staggeringly cool file system, and nobody knows about it.

    Only 25 comments too. Apparently there is a definite audience to cater to now rather than providing actual news. Mustn't frighten the linux weenies. *sigh* /. really sucks sometimes.
    • Amen. I don't mind the PRO Linux slant of /. but since there is a linux.slashdot.org, at least allow the front page to have real news. Every Linux item will show up on linux.slashdot.org no matter what. Just leave the front page for real news. Even the teenagers in HS have to be sick of reading a front page article about some minor Linux story.

  • CPL (Score:1)

    by bafio ( 879076 )
    On the website they say they wait for people porting ZFS to other OS.
    I would hope it could be ported to linux, does anyone knows if the licence is compatible?
    This looks like a very very promising filesytem!!
    • Why wouldn't the license be compatible?

      Even if they did a "binary only" type release, you could still load the zfs module into the kernel and use the program.

      GPL is not "viral". To believe that running something on Linux - even in the kernel space - means that you have to open your source to world means that you have been listening to too much MicroSoft FUD.

  • ...now promised for some post-Vista date. I know both FS'es are not the same thing, but both are supposed to be revolutions in this field, and there are important points in common like transactional semantics and much easier administration of large volumes of data.

    I tried the WinFS beta a couple months ago, and was horrified with the amount of RAM it sucks. I got close to 300Mb running only Windows and the WinFS daemons; without any application running, and without using any feature of WinFS. If the best
  • After reading some docs and viewing a few of the presentations, I'm convinced. ZFS is well-planned and well-executed. It will solve lots of problems. Sometimes, smart people do smart things. I'm glad to see good ideas coming out of Sun Microsystems, and I'm not just saying that because of the money I threw away buying their stock.

    For this former solaris user, the real question is when Apple will pick it up so that I can use it easily.

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