Talk:ZFS

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/Archive 1: Jun 2005 - Sep 2006

[edit] NetApp lawsuit

NetApp has sued Sun for patent violations in ZFS. I think a heading regarding these legal issues should therefore be added.Laxstar5 14:36, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps a "Controversy" section? Although I'm not really sure that the patent lawsuit is germane to the article; given the sue-happy nature of business in the US, if every tech article had a list of the patent lawsuits associated with it, they'd all be 100% larger than they are, and 50% less informative. Let's just note the facts. Rubicon 03:43, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Checksums?

Sun's FAQ [1] indicates 64-bit checksums but the article indicates 256 checksums. Anyone have a justification for 256? --Treekids 21:45, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

The link you provided, being from SUN, is likely accurate. I've updated the article. Rubicon 05:17, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Shoot. According to [2], ZFS does use 256-bit checksums. Now I'm upset. Looks like marketing hasn't been speaking with development. Reverting to 256. -Rubicon 07:56, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Boiling the oceans

Perhaps we could remove the boiling the oceans quote since it really does not add anything to the article 66.68.63.11 06:34, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

It adds to the history and understanding of the article: this quote is one of the notable things in ZFS's history, and it helps to put its architectural limitations (or lack thereof) in terms more people can understand. Almost all of us who are used to scientific notation still don't have a "feel" for numbers like 18.4 × 10¹⁸.... Hga 11:32, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Along the same lines, is it really necessary to express all the storage mentioned in the article as a power-of-two? I don't recall being overwhelmed with joy that the 120 GB hdd I bought two years ago had a capacity of a touch less than 2³⁷ bytes. Of course, when speaking of things like 'the number of entries in a directory', it's much neater (to my eyes) to say "2⁴⁸" than it is to say "281,474,976,710,656" - but do we really need to show, for example, 16 EB in terms of powers-of-two of bytes? Rubicon 07:20, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

I find it amusing that while I can have a 16 EiB file, the filename limit is still 255 characters. Needless to say, the latter is significantly more relevant to me. Superm401 - Talk 11:11, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Could this be for POSIX compliance (NAME_MAX)?.--NapoliRoma (talk) 13:55, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] limitations need citing and impartiality

The article states:

"ZFS lacks transparent encryption, a la NTFS, and presently only n+1 redundancy is possible. n+2 redundancy (RAID level 6) is only in the development branch—via the OpenSolaris distribution[1]. These omissions in the production branch of Solaris (as of Solaris 06/06 current release) diminishes ZFS's attractiveness in several situations at which it's targeted."

I think that this could be written more impartially, but still convey the same facts by being rewritten to read:

"Transparent encryption is still in the process of being implemented for ZFS. [3] Some features, including N+2 redundancy (RAID level 6), which are available in OpenSolaris and Solaris Express, are not yet available in Solaris 10."

Readers can draw their own conclusions about whether those limitations diminish ZFS's attractiveness.

At a minimum, the situations in which ZFS's attractiveness is diminished need to be explicitly listed. Better yet, a published article backing up this claim could be cited.

(For the record, I am a ZFS developer.)

Mahrens 06:02, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Citation needed.

Will some expert kindly provide a source for the sentence quoted below, so that I can reach my goal of paring down the Citation Needed references on the following page? http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Articles_with_unsourced_statements&from=Z

The quota model and other useful management capabilities suggest the possiblity of per-user filesystems, rather than simple home directories.[citation needed]

Sincerely, GeorgeLouis 06:27, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 128 bit?

Seeing as all the limits are 2^64 or less, I wonder why the 128 bit denomination. Anyone care to explain? It's probably something worth mentioning in the article. -Anonymous —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 83.138.218.1 (talk) 19:50, 19 December 2006 (UTC).

I think you're right. I don't see anything 128-bit'ish about this filesystem. According to the article, it certainly can't store more than 2⁷⁸ bytes in a disk array, and it can only fill that if you create 16384 filesystems. There's a conflict between the specs and the claims in the Capacity section. It seems like "128-bit" is at best half-true marketing hype from Sun. If there's any basis for this number at all, it should be addressed in the article. Either way, someone who knows should definitely explain this. There are a lot of skeptics. -- Bilbo1507 00:13, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

(Responding to myself.) I happened upon this discussion. This really needs to be explained in the article. I'd write it, but I don't feel qualified to do so. Is there someone willing to write it who is familiar enough with ZFS to write a robust explanation and cite sources? http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?threshold=0&mode=nested&commentsort=0&sid=238977&cid=19569673 -- Bilbo1507 19:28, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

Is it something like what MS did with NTFS? NTFS is a 64 bit filesystem but the first few implementations were 48 bit. So is it like 128 bit design but current implementations are limited to 64 bits? --soum ^talk 19:47, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

Apparently, POSIX defines no 128-bit interfaces yet, 64 being the max available. SUN could've written their own libraries, but that would've broken POSIX compliance. So while I think it's nice that SUN can say they have a 128-bit, POSIX-compliant FS, given the situation, they could've just as easily said a 256-, 384-, or 512-bit FS. I'm not going to rock the boat and say "ZFS isn't 128-bits!", but for all practical purposes, ZFS is (for the time being) a 64-bit FS. Presumably, once POSIX catches up, it should be a (relatively) simple matter to scale-up to 128-bit, given that ZFS' block pointers allocate a 128-bit address. [4] -Rubicon 08:26, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Apple / Solaris

The listed operating systems for ZFS are as follows: "Supported operating systems Solaris, Mac OS X v10.5". OS X hasn't even been released yet. Other OS' IE: FreeBSD have a port in progress; however, they are not listed in the description as being supported. Suggestion; remove OS X 10.5 from the list until the release of OS X 10.5 has been confirmed with ZFS.

Done. Please sign your posts. Chris Cunningham 11:28, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

zfs support seems to be gone from build 9a410. It's no longer in the GUI and there appear to be no command-line binaries, anymore, fwiw Jgw 02:09, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] zfs share

Add section to discuss 'zfs share' feature?

[edit] Lead

The lead says "It is notable..."; however that sounds PoV (as it implies deliverately drawing attention to some way of interpretation). Please fix it to be something neutral. --soum^talk 07:06, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

I made the change. I am open for a discussion if anyone is opposed to it. --soum^talk 15:06, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] ZFS administration gui

http://blogs.sun.com/talley/entry/manage_zfs_from_your_browser —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.7.147.153 (talk) 04:19, 18 April 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Z-FS Disambiguation...

I was doing research on several NAS devices that claimed to support Z-FS... it turns out that it is not ZFS but instead a filesystem by a company named Zetera trademarked Z-FS. The only details on the FS I can find are in a marketing blurb here:

http://www.zetera.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4&Itemid=7

Should there be a disambiguation note about this since I have seen this cropping up on several different NAS devices? Especially since several of them omit the hyphen and actually list it as ZFS on some of their manuals/dialog boxes.

Does anyone know which came first (trademark wise) ZFS from solaris or Z-FS from Zetera (more for curiosity than anything)

Aelana 18:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Done. --soum (0_o) 20:08, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Confusing use of "file system"

The article sometimes uses the term "file system" to mean "a file system type", and sometimes to mean "an instance of a file system. This makes the article quite confusing. Especially confusing is this sentence: "Unlike a traditional file system, which resides on a single device and thus requires a volume manager to use more than one device, ZFS is built on top of virtual storage pools called zpools". Does "reside" mean the same as "use" here? If not, what is the difference? If yes, the sentence is contradictory: it says that traditional file systems reside on a single device, but sometimes not. I do not know the correct technical terms that distinguish the type from the instance. Please update the article with the correct unambiguous terms. -Pgan002 18:33, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Been looking at the Storage pools section of the article, and, yes, it is probably confusing for someone who's never dealt with something like LVM. Should I rewrite it, maybe, with more of a layperson in mind? -Rubicon 05:33, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] On Portal:Free software, ZFS is currently the selected article

Just to let you know. The purpose of selecting an article is both to point readers to the article and to highlight it to potential contributors. It will remain on the portal for a week or so. The previous selected article was OpenDocument. Gronky 12:24, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

The selected article box has been updated again, ZFS has been superceded by Emacs (to mark the release of GNU Emacs v22). Gronky 13:20, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] ZFS in OS 10.5

It only seems logical to me that if ZFS is the default fs in OSX, then it must be able to act as a root partition. The statement in the article that says otherwise is outdated, yes? --70.91.110.41 21:15, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Its nothing but a rumor until Apple makes it official. Since when did wiki become a rumor site?

Marc Hamilton has backed away from his original 'confirmation' in the comments section of his blog. He says he has no knowledge of Apple's product plans.

Here is a link to confirmation that it will NOT be included in Leopard. [5] Should we remove the rumor then?--147.160.136.10 17:42, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

It was not a rumor - It's widely known that Apple's OS team had ZFS running. That said, it's clearly not in Leopard, per yesterday and today's Apple announcements. We could speculate why or what's going on, but that's pointless, and Wikipedia is not supposed to speculate. It's not in Leopard, and so it should be off the list of supported OSes. Georgewilliamherbert 17:51, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Annnd it's back. See [6] in which Apple clarifies that it's in there but not available as a default filesystem or bootable filesystem. Sort of. The clarification isn't entirely clear, but they do say that ZFS is on the system. Georgewilliamherbert 00:44, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Storage Pools

Can the information on storage pools be clarified or described in non-tech terms? I understand it this way, all drives show up as one device. If I have a computer with a 500GB internal drive formatted with ZFS (I'll call it Zelda), and I plug-in a 500GB Firewire ZFS drive, it will automatically expand the capacity of the Zelda volume to 1TB? Any drive I add or remove will merely change the total available disk space under one volume? --24.249.108.133 22:29, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

See this; o.p. has the wrong idea about how zpools, vdevs, etc. function. -Rubicon 05:38, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Storage Units

Reading [this], ZFS' ultimate limitation is stated in terms of ZB, not ZiB; I therefore infer that where the article states EiB, it would be more accurate to use the term EB. Can't find supporting evidence for the 'max size of single file', 'max size of an attribute', etc. I've never liked the practice of using binary prefixes - always seemed like a way for a storage vendor to scam a customer into thinking they were getting more storage than they actually were. Does anyone have any references for the numbers given in the article - and proper storage units? Rubicon 07:09, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] ZFS in the release version of Mac OS X 10.5

I've tried to update the info on the current Mac OS X implementation, but I was not sure what of the older rumors/announcements to leave in. I hope I've found a good compromise, using as much as possible of the original text. Do you agree? Xnyhps (talk) 14:38, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Solaris implementation - Out of Date

In the forth entry under Solaris implementation Issues it says:

New vdevs can be added to a storage pool, but they cannot be removed. A vdev can be exchanged for using a bigger new one, but it cannot be removed, in the process reducing the total pool storage size even if the pool has enough unused space. The ability to shrink a zpool is a work in progress, currently targeted for a Solaris 10 update in late 2007.

Well...it is 2008. Did they or didn't they implement this new feature? This isn't the only item with this problem. Maybe someone who uses the latest release can go through and update this section.

12.207.190.29 (talk) 04:07, 31 January 2008 (UTC) KRowe (not registered)

I wanted to add that there is a new version of OpenSolaris (2008/05) with a better implementation of ZFS. It should be noted and updated. --HeffeQue (talk) 18:09, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] ZFS vs. zFS; google hits

In my last edit summary, I mentioned that zFS (as in Z/OS) had "fewer than 200 Google hits". I don't know what mutated search I did then, because I just tried it again and got more like 17,000 hits. This still seems to me to be fewer than would justify having it specifically mentioned in the lede, though.--NapoliRoma (talk) 21:58, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Casablanca?

No comment on what was discussed, but Linus Torvalds and Jeff Bonwick have been talking http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/casablanca Robmbrooks (talk) 10:17, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Linux section: OR?

I'm concerned that the linux section suffers from original research. The suggestion that because ntfs-3g (a FUSE filesystem) performs "well", based on a single benchmark, is used to suggest that the zfs port could perform "excellently". This is a bit of a leap of faith logically. -- 87.194.117.25 (talk) 14:34, 24 May 2008 (UTC)