[geeks] Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris bits to be in next version of OSX

[Scott Howard]

On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 03:39:40PM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 04:19:34PM -0400, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
> > I'm not familiar with ZFS.  What does it give you besides giant 
> > filesystem/file sizes?  Does it have metadata/data journaling?  Verzioning?
> > How hard is it to port?
> 
> It's a combined volume manager and filesystem.

No it's not.  It's a filesystem.

Volume managers were only ever a hack - they were something to allow us
to get around the limitations of a single slice in the days when
filesystems didn't have the smarts to do anything more than write to a
single device.

Unfortunately once someone invented the volume manager we all forgot
they they were a hack, and started relying on them.  The correct solution
was always going to be to create a filesystem that was smart enough to
handle more than a single device - it just took a long time for someone
to do it.

So ZFS is a filesystem - that's all.  It just happens to be a filesystem
that is smart enough that it has no need for a Volume Manager hack  layer
living between it and the disk.

  Scott.