Hello everyone,
I ran across the article below this morning, and I wanted to get a discussion going with some of the members here.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/0...-good-and-bad-in-apples-new-apfs-file-system/
In short, Apple is developing a new ZFS-like filesystem, and the article discusses it's intended feature set.
A few key points that sprang to my attention were as follows:
* No RAID as it's intended for single hard drive devices
* Checksums on metadata but not on user data
* Inclusion of fsck
-This portion is really interesting. The ZFS dev said, "WTH is this here?" and the APFS Dev responded, "WTH isn't it there in ZFS?"
* Hubris?
- Explicitly not checksumming user data is a little more interesting. The APFS engineers I talked to cited strong ECC protection within Apple storage devices [implicitly citing that this made checksumming unnecessary]
- Apple engineers I spoke with claimed that bit rot was not a problem for users of their devices
* Scrubs essentially impossible as we think of them
- As data ages you might occasionally want to check for bit rot. Likely fsck_apfs can accomplish this; though as noted there's no data redundancy and no checksums for user data, so scrub would only help to find problems and likely wouldn't help to correct them.
From a ZFS perspective, this looks disappointingly insufficient, but as the article states this is intended for Single Drive devices (Macs to watches).
Are we looking at something useful here, or is it already overshadowed by the likes of ZFS/BTRFS/etc.? Would those be better alternatives, even, in single drive devices?
I ran across the article below this morning, and I wanted to get a discussion going with some of the members here.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/0...-good-and-bad-in-apples-new-apfs-file-system/
In short, Apple is developing a new ZFS-like filesystem, and the article discusses it's intended feature set.
A few key points that sprang to my attention were as follows:
* No RAID as it's intended for single hard drive devices
* Checksums on metadata but not on user data
* Inclusion of fsck
-This portion is really interesting. The ZFS dev said, "WTH is this here?" and the APFS Dev responded, "WTH isn't it there in ZFS?"
* Hubris?
- Explicitly not checksumming user data is a little more interesting. The APFS engineers I talked to cited strong ECC protection within Apple storage devices [implicitly citing that this made checksumming unnecessary]
- Apple engineers I spoke with claimed that bit rot was not a problem for users of their devices
* Scrubs essentially impossible as we think of them
- As data ages you might occasionally want to check for bit rot. Likely fsck_apfs can accomplish this; though as noted there's no data redundancy and no checksums for user data, so scrub would only help to find problems and likely wouldn't help to correct them.
From a ZFS perspective, this looks disappointingly insufficient, but as the article states this is intended for Single Drive devices (Macs to watches).
Are we looking at something useful here, or is it already overshadowed by the likes of ZFS/BTRFS/etc.? Would those be better alternatives, even, in single drive devices?