Back in 2016, Ars Technica picked up this piece from my blog [1] as well as a longer piece reviewing the newly announced APFS [2] [3]. Glad it's still finding an audience!<p>[1]: <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/zfs-the-other-new-apple-file-system-that-almost-was-until-it-wasnt/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/zfs-the-other-new-ap...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://ahl.dtrace.org/2016/06/19/apfs-part1/" rel="nofollow">https://ahl.dtrace.org/2016/06/19/apfs-part1/</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/a-zfs-developers-analysis-of-the-good-and-bad-in-apples-new-apfs-file-system/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/a-zfs-developers-ana...</a>
As a desktop user, I am content with APFS. The only feature from ZFS that I would like, is the corruption detection. I honestly don't know how robust the image and video formats are to bit corruption. On the one hand, potentially, "very" robust. But on the other, I would think that there are some very special bits that if toggled can potentially "ruin" the entire file. But I don't know.<p>However, I can say, every time I've tried ZFS on my iMac, it was simply a disaster.<p>Just trying to set it up on a single USB drive, or setting it up to mirror a pair. The net effect was that it CRUSHED the performance on my machine. It became unusable. We're talking "move the mouse, watch the pointer crawl behind" unusable. "Let's type at 300 baud" unusable. Interactive performance was shot.<p>After I remove it, all is right again.
The death of ZFS in macOS was a huge shift in the industry. This has to be seen in the context of microsoft killed their largely ambitious WinFS which felt like the death of desktop innovation in combination.
Not to pointlessly nitpick, but:<p>> HFS improved upon the Macintosh File System by adding—wait for it—hierarchy! No longer would files accumulate in a single pile; you could organize them in folders.<p>MFS <i>did</i> allow you to organize your files into folders, but on-disk they were represented as a single list of files with unique filenames - meaning you could have 'resume.txt' in a folder called 'Jan's Docs' but you couldn't also have 'resume.txt' in a folder called 'Jake's Docs' - every file on the disk needed to have a unique filename.<p>Not so much an issue in the days of 400KB floppy drives, but once people started getting 20 MB hard drives that was going to be an unacceptable limitation.<p>The other major benefit of HFS was that it stored file data in a B-tree, which allowed directory information to be stored effectively hierarchically, meaning you could find a directory's contents very quickly. With MFS, every file being stored in a single list meant that any time you wanted to get a directory's contents you had to read through that list of every file on the disk to see which ones were stored in that directory, so every listing of any directory was O(n) for the total number of files on the disk.
Besides the licensing issue, I wonder if optimizing ZFS for low latency + low RAM + low power on iPhone was an uphill battle or if it’s easy. My experiencing running ZFS years ago was poor latency and large RAM use with my NAS, but that hardware and drive configuration was optimized for low $ per gb stored and used parity stuff.
"Still another version I’ve heard calls into question the veracity of their purported friendship, and has Steve instead suggesting that Larry go f*ck himself. Normally the iconoclast, that would, if true, represent Steve’s most mainstream opinion."<p>LOL!!<p>I really hope they weren't friends, that really shatters my internal narrative (mainly because I can't actually picture either of them having actual friends).
Apple and Sun couldn't agree on a 'support contract'. From Jeff Bonwick, one of the co-creators ZFS:<p>>> <i>Apple can currently just take the ZFS CDDL code and incorporate it (like they did with DTrace), but it may be that they wanted a "private license" from Sun (with appropriate technical support and indemnification), and the two entities couldn't come to mutually agreeable terms.</i><p>> <i>I cannot disclose details, but that is the essence of it.</i><p>* <a href="https://archive.is/http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-October/033125.html" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs...</a><p>Apple took DTrace, licensed via CDDL—just like ZFS—and put it into the kernel without issue. Of course a file system is much more central to an operating system, so they wanted much more of a CYA for that.
Kind of odd that the blog states that "The architect for ZFS at Apple had left" and links to the LinkedIn profile of someone who doesn't have any Apple work experience listed on their resume. I assume the author linked to the wrong profile?
It was just yesterday I relistened to the contemporary Hypercritical episode on the topic: <a href="https://hypercritical.fireside.fm/56" rel="nofollow">https://hypercritical.fireside.fm/56</a>
Discussed at the time:<p><i>ZFS: Apple’s New Filesystem That Wasn’t</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11909606">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11909606</a> - June 2016 (128 comments)
Thanks for sharing I was just looking for what happened to Sun. I like the second-hand quote comparing the IBM and HP as "garbage trucks colliding" plus the inclusion of blog posts with links to the court filings.<p>Is it fair to say ZFS made most sense on Solaris using Solaris Containers on SPARK?
ZFS remains an excellent filesystem for bulk storage on rust, but were I Apple at the time, I would probably want to focus on something built for the coming era of flash and NVMe storage. There are a number of axioms built into ZFS that come out of the spinning disk era that still hold it back for flash-only filesystems.
I wonder what ZFS in the iPhone would've looked like. As far as I recall, the iPhone didn't have error correcting memory, and ZFS is notorious for corrupting itself when bit flips hit it and break the checksum on disk. ZFS' RAM-hungry nature would've also forced Apple to add more memory to their phone.
ZFS sort of moved inside the NVMe controller - it also checksums and scrubs things all the time, you just don't see it. This does not, however, support multi-device redundant storage, but that is not a concern for Apple - the vast majority of their devices have only one storage device.
ZFS is the king of all file systems. As someone with over a petabyte of storage across 275 drives I have never lost a single byte due to a hard drive failure or corruption thanks to ZFS