Excellent News from Ten's Complement
sammy ominsky
First, I'd like to mention I've been in the irc channel (#mac-zfs on freenode) for the past day, and it's sort of fun. Come join us there!
I've been following Don Brady's tweets, which informed me that they're going to be releasing the source for Z-410. No clue yet which pieces and how much of it beyond what's absolutely required, though. I guess we wait and see!
sambo
Dan Bethe
On Mar 17, 2:47 pm, sammy ominsky <s...@avoidant.org> wrote:
> First, I'd like to mention I've been in the irc channel (#mac-zfs on freenode) for the past day, and it's sort of fun. Come join us there!
> I've been following Don Brady's tweets, which informed me that they're going to be releasing the source for Z-410. No clue yet which pieces and how much of it beyond what's absolutely required, though. I guess we wait and see!
correct their verbage so that it no longer falsely claims that ZFS on
MacOS is new, novel, or unique! I've been obstinately told by
innumerable people from all other ZFS-hosting platforms that ZFS on
MacOS does not and can not exist *at all*. So the last thing I'd want
to hear from a fellow ZFS on MacOS project, is that our project has
not been freely, generously, and fearlessly advanced for the last few
years by so many valiant volunteers. ;-) Hehe.
I know that we all look forward to the hope of a full source code
release, and the healthy collaboration between community and
corporation which has made ZFS great on all platforms! And if we only
get partial source, I look forward to supporting everyone's efforts in
continuing to engineer this free project, freshly inspired by theirs.
God bless y'all.
Chris Ridd
There's a good interview with Don at <http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/03/how-zfs-is-slowly-making-its-way-to-mac-os-x.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss>
Chris
Alex Blewitt
On Mar 17, 2:47 pm, sammy ominsky <s...@avoidant.org> wrote:I've been following Don Brady's tweets, which informed me that they're going to be releasing the source for Z-410.
Now let's hope when they get their web site together, that they
correct their verbage so that it no longer falsely claims that ZFS on
MacOS is new, novel, or unique!
So the last thing I'd want
to hear from a fellow ZFS on MacOS project, is that our project has
not been freely, generously, and fearlessly advanced for the last few
years by so many valiant volunteers.
Mike Heller
It sure looks current!
Dedupe
Compression
Acls
Send/revved
Afp/smb sharing.
Dan Bethe
route! We want them to rock the world, hard.
Since we have little to do but talk about it today, I'll indulge.
Wouldn't it be totally surreal if they ended up taking the route of
Kaleidoscope-to-AppearanceManager, or of Final Cut Pro? Start a
corporation which ends up (or starts out?) being shopped to Apple for
acquisition, thus sparing Apple the initial distraction and cost, and
sparing the project from the risk of getting prematurely Steved? And
then ZFS gets finally and officially and permanently integrated into
MacOS. Infinity-triple-bonus for having *started* as an Apple
skunkworks, having been adopted from a Sun skunk-ish-works. It's
beyond insanely great, it's reality distortion folding in recursively
upon itself. It'd be one for the books.
In any case, the real artists finally ship. Hats off. I hope they
have a huge party.
That's what makes last decade's unison of Apple with free software to
be so extremely special. It's a perfect unison of artistry,
engineering, culture, and love.
> > Now let's hope when they get their web site together, that they
> > correct their verbage so that it no longer falsely claims that ZFS on
> > MacOS is new, novel, or unique!
>
> Unfortunately there's a lot of these kinds of claims being reprinted. ArsTechnica interviewed him and MacZFS wasn't mentioned by either party.
I am quite a hybrid (a mutt?), myself. I *hate* being in a position
where I risk sounding like I'm self-aggrandizing or proselytizing and
I'd never try to make anyone say "GNU/Linux". But like any free
software, after the initial source code release by Sun, our project is
not allowed to exist or declared to be dead by edict of any corporate
entity. This community reciprocated with Sun and Apple, through the
magic of the free software license, and made and supported a product
which is so good that it didn't require any critical updates for the
last year.
My personal background is half commercial Linux (having moved across
the country to join VA Research and help jumpstart what became
Sourceforge, and play the role of corporate benefactor of free
software back when it was patently uncool), half fist-in-the-air FSF-
booth-volunteering free software advocate, and half Mac addict. I
know they are all coexistant and interdependent (sometimes symbiotic)
organisms in an ecosystem.
I don't know the engineering reality of porting ZFS to MacOS, and for
all I know, maybe it wouldn't have happened so far without Apple's
extreme jump start of codebase and community willpower. Maybe the
frustration alone would have motivated some brilliant volunteers
instead, to make a usable port. As I've always said here, I love my
corporate benefactors; I just favor the truth!
"Our Z-410 Storage (#zfs for #osx) external beta starts next week!
Finally others can experience all the latest #zfs goodness on their
Macs" <-- From their twitter feed, that statement is very correct,
thanks to the qualifier of "latest". LOL!
> I think what we can take from this is the MacZFS project kept this community alive and the demand in scope to such an extent that made it possible for Don to leave Apple and start TensComplement, as well as enabling those of us who have supported the dream of ZFS on OSX to see it through not one but two OS revisions.
users of MacZFS 74/75/77 ;-) Where'd they get all these zpools
attached to their MacOS systems? ;-)
> Certainly, Don is the one to keep the advances going forward. After all, let's not forget he and the other pioneers at Apple (especially Noël) made it happen in the first place.
of Don before this week. In my initial deep research on the history
of Apple's ZFS, I only recall reading about Noël. I hope that she's
been continuing to watch our mailing list, as I have read her having
done in the Nabble archives, from her invisibly disembodied
metaphysically cyberspatial sci-fi perch. Thanks for tossing me the
little dots that I can paste in for her name, Alex ;)
http://mac-os-x-zfs-discuss.19757.n3.nabble.com/The-cat-is-out-of-the-bag-td21601i40.html#a21662
lol.
> I suspect MacZFS may be the last of the PPC stragglers though; somehow I doubt that Don is going to support that far back. But with little public information and no direct contact I have no facts on which to base my assumptions.
"The 4-way nature of Mac OS X (user 32/64 & kernel 32/64) makes
developer testing much harder than it should be! 64-bit only would be
nice" -- Don via twitter.
Dan Shoop
-d
-d
-----
Dan Shoop
masterof...@gmail.com
Dan Bethe
On Mar 18, 4:08 pm, Dan Shoop <masteroffoxho...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been chatting with Chris Foresman, and he informs me that he's writing an addendum to the article (which which will include reference to the MacZFS port) and that the Ten's Complement version of ZFS is based from the current Sun/Oracle ZFS build. Even parity with current ZFS!
BTW, I submitted feedback on the beta testing form on
tenscomplement.com, stating my commitment to a free MacZFS. I
regretfully said that if there wasn't a full source code release, I'd
have to stick with MacZFS 74, which would be graciously improved at
least by the company's legally required source code minimum.
Regretful not that there's anything wrong with MacZFS 74, but that we
wouldn't be able to collaborate as a community as fully as we'd love
to.
It makes very little sense to commit to a data integrity guarantee
which cannot be verified!
Dan Bethe
Apple and that became the Appearance Manager. No. That didn't
happen. But still, the Appearance Manager team went to cool lengths
to interoperate with Kaleidoscope, but their efforts were politically
stymied, and Kaleidoscope ended up eating Appearance Manager's lunch
nonetheless. So pretend that went the way it could have or should
have, and you'd get what I meant ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_Manager#Kaleidoscope
Dan Bethe
user 'rednul' had just read the Ars Technica article about Ten's
Complement, and took it upon himself to start googling the history of
ZFS on MacOS, which led him to our Google Code page, which led him to
the IRC channel. ;) He's now pricing out a 6x2TB drive set, upon
which to install MacZFS 74.
It's Ten's Complement's first community contribution (that, and also,
hope). Hooray!
Dan Bethe
And...bristling. ;-) Just in time for us to display the new project
welcome page that I wrote yesterday at http://code.google.com/p/maczfs/
Good job, Chris!
Dan Bethe
http://tenscomplement.com/ and I submitted the following note.
According to Don's twitter feed, they've been listening to feedback
from beta testers, so everyone is encouraged to submit their kind and
polite thoughts! I wouldn't expect their P.R. or web design or
marketing people to be aware of these facts.
"Hi there! Congratulations on your new web site format. It looks
great and I love the plastic people. Could I possibly trouble you
with a little correction on a couple of the statements there? There
are a lot of people who would really appreciate your kind attention.
It says "ZFS and Mac OS X -- together at last!" and the 'about' page
says "and those who can’t wait to combine the world’s most innovative
operating system with the world’s most advanced file system."
Both of those statements are factually incorrect, and would instead be
correctly attributed to the free software projects which have always
existed. There's been a free implementation of ZFS for years, which
your staff worked on at one point, and which has been a stable
production release without any need to wait for ZFS on Mac OS for
quite some time now. It's located at http://code.google.com/p/maczfs/
for your reference. The recent ArsTechnica article about your company
was quickly amended to state that as well.
I'm not one to nitpick! Especially to such a blessedly welcome member
of the community! Please don't get me wrong! I just like facts,
especially those which are foremost in the public eye! :-) And I
thought that it'd be a great time to nip it in the bud.
You guys are awesome, I'm a huge fan and a beta tester, and I can't
say enough how excited the MacZFS community is."
Daniel Bethe
describes Ten's Complement as "an open source company". They're busily working
on the product while trying to decide what licenses to use for their own
contributions, and they look forward to working with us openly. He's asking for
more background information and is just generally nice.
Daniel Bethe
Illumos community to eventually submit code upstream.
----- Original Message ----
> From: Dan Bethe <smuc...@gmail.com>
> To: zfs-macos <zfs-...@googlegroups.com>
> Sent: Friday, March 25, 2011 11:59:31
> Subject: [zfs-macos] Re: Excellent News from Ten's Complement
>
Daniel Bethe
first-contact chat! We're hopefully soon entering a new era for our community,
for Mac OS, and for ZFS in general.
Ten's Complement is working directly with the Illumos community (the spiritual
successor of OpenSolaris, and core free Solaris code base in the post-Sun era)
to help organize a global ZFS working group. They would help to unify the ZFS
community by providing a reference platform of ZFS, and obviously Ten's
Complement would make MacOS into a top-tier citizen there. They're already
pushing Mac OS-specific patches to them.
Don said that the fact that his company's internal and external behaviors have
appeared to be rather opaque to us, is just an unfortunate coincidence. That's
just been the appearance, not the intention. And he did not see the email CC'd
by Alex. They switched ISPs right at that point in time. His team has had
their heads down, working hard, and taking the fastest, easiest path to
assimilate the latest free ZFS. They regrettably didn't have time for chit-chat
until lately but they do have a public relations person who's developing some
things.
We'll hear more soon, about integrating what he calls "an open source company"
with the community. And people like Alex and Bjoern and Dustin and all the
other contributors and supporters of this community (anyone who's reading this,
especially if you post) have cultured the perfect beta testing base. He lit the
torch and we've carried it.
I think it's easy to say that Ten's Complement has a burgeoning market all sewn
up and ready to be developed. System administrators and prosumers, even just
photographers and other digital artists, are going to be all over ZFS once it's
more fully integrated with the OS and commercially productized and supported. I
would expect the beginnings of a higher level of integration between ZFS and
applications at some point.
It's too early to tell, and I admit that I do like a good hyperbole, but in my
opinion, Mac OS may get its storage strategy back. Call me crazy.
I hope you guys don't mind that I spoke directly for all of us in saying that
Don's our hero right now! I mean, when he decides to.... showwww us the code!
;)
X Bytor
...
>
> It's too early to tell, and I admit that I do like a good hyperbole, but in my
> opinion, Mac OS may get its storage strategy back. Call me crazy.
>
This is the best news I've heard in quite awhile. Thanks for taking
the call for us.
-X
Daniel Bethe
> This is the best news I've heard in quite awhile. Thanks for taking
> the call for us.
Oh my yes. It is my distinct privilege.
I told Don that the MacZFS community is to Ten's Complement like frothing, rabid
geeks camped out in front of the theater, waiting for a release of the next Star
Wars movie.
I hope you don't mind.
Daniel Bethe
that should show you how much interest he has in collaboration! ;)
Early in my experience, I had asked some people about it, and they said that
MacFUSE was in such disrepair that it was not possible to even start porting ZFS
to it. They say there's only one maintainer, who has been on indefinite hiatus.
I just wanted to ask you all to see if there was a more definitive answer.
Just now, I found this:
http://groups.google.com/group/macfuse/msg/a5e23d8f587993eb?pli=1
And I'm told that this is the most reliable version, where some others are
terrible:
http://www.tuxera.com/mac/macfuse-core-10.5-2.1.9.dmg
So that's all I know!
Björn Kahl
> By the way, Don asked if there was such a thing as a MacFUSE-ZFS project. So
> that should show you how much interest he has in collaboration! ;)
>
> Early in my experience, I had asked some people about it, and they said that
> MacFUSE was in such disrepair that it was not possible to even start porting ZFS
> to it. They say there's only one maintainer, who has been on indefinite hiatus.
> I just wanted to ask you all to see if there was a more definitive answer.
Well, I am working on connecting MacZFS with MacFUSE. Currently using
MacZFS-74. After porting ztest and in that process libzpool it felt
natural to try and get the zpl part also running in userspace. So far
I'd say it is not particularly difficult, I am just horribly slow in
progress due to very, very limited time to spend on this.
> Just now, I found this:
>
> http://groups.google.com/group/macfuse/msg/a5e23d8f587993eb?pli=1
>
> And I'm told that this is the most reliable version, where some others are
> terrible:
>
> http://www.tuxera.com/mac/macfuse-core-10.5-2.1.9.dmg
>
> So that's all I know!
All the best
Björn
--
| Bjoern Kahl +++ Siegburg +++ Germany |
| "googlelogin@-my-domain-" +++ www.bjoern-kahl.de |
| Languages: German, English, Ancient Latin (a bit :-)) |
Daniel Bethe
> Well, I am working on connecting MacZFS with MacFUSE. Currently using
> MacZFS-74. After porting ztest and in that process libzpool it felt
> natural to try and get the zpl part also running in userspace. So far
> I'd say it is not particularly difficult, I am just horribly slow in
> progress due to very, very limited time to spend on this.
Well that's fascinating. Where is your MacFUSE-ZFS? You're saying that you
ported ztest and libzpool only to MacFUSE-ZFS, not to the kext-based system?
Where can we get it?
Daniel Bethe
> MacZFS-74. After porting ztest and in that process libzpool it felt
> natural to try and get the zpl part also running in userspace. So far
> I'd say it is not particularly difficult, I am just horribly slow in
> progress due to very, very limited time to spend on this.
If we have the kernel-based MacZFS 74 installed, with a zpool, we don't have
ztest, correct? I haven't seen a ztest binary on MacOS. So there wouldn't be
any point in a non-developer installing your MacFUSE-ZFS just to access ztest on
a production system, because it would only use MacFUSE for all zpool access
rather than the kernel MacZFS, right?
Björn Kahl
It's the other way around. I ported ztest and libzpool for the
official MacZFS, the kernel-based one mainly maintained by
Alex. I forked his Github repository and made ztest and libzpool
work. Both are in my Github repository. See also Issue #14. Note
that my public Github repository is not up-to-date, the MacZFS-74
version of ztest has not arrived there (had not found the time to
really clean it up). My "port" to MacZFS is not yet in a working
state and therefore not yet released.
Best
Björn Kahl
> Am 26.03.11 16:28, schrieb Daniel Bethe:
>>> Well, I am working on connecting MacZFS with MacFUSE. Currently using
>>> MacZFS-74. After porting ztest and in that process libzpool it felt
>>> natural to try and get the zpl part also running in userspace. So far
>>> I'd say it is not particularly difficult, I am just horribly slow in
>>> progress due to very, very limited time to spend on this.
>>
>> Well that's fascinating. Where is your MacFUSE-ZFS? You're saying that you
>> ported ztest and libzpool only to MacFUSE-ZFS, not to the kext-based system?
>> Where can we get it?
>
> It's the other way around. I ported ztest and libzpool for the
> official MacZFS, the kernel-based one mainly maintained by
> Alex. I forked his Github repository and made ztest and libzpool
> work. Both are in my Github repository. See also Issue #14. Note
> that my public Github repository is not up-to-date, the MacZFS-74
> version of ztest has not arrived there (had not found the time to
> really clean it up). My "port" to MacZFS is not yet in a working
> state and therefore not yet released.
Oops, the last line should read:
My "port" of MacZFS to MacFUSE is not yet in a working state and
therefore not yet released.
Björn
Daniel Bethe
> official MacZFS, the kernel-based one mainly maintained by
> Alex. I forked his Github repository and made ztest and libzpool
> work. Both are in my Github repository. See also Issue #14. Note
> that my public Github repository is not up-to-date, the MacZFS-74
> version of ztest has not arrived there (had not found the time to
> really clean it up). My "port" to MacZFS is not yet in a working
> state and therefore not yet released.
Hi there Bjoern. I'm sorry but, just to clarify, it looks like you ported
libzpool and ztest to kernel-based MacZFS 72 which doesn't work on kernel MacZFS
74. Thanks for your efforts.
http://code.google.com/p/maczfs/issues/detail?id=14
But were you saying that you haven't released your MacFUSE-ZFS code at all? I
would imagine that Don might possibly appreciate having what remains of your
MacFUSE-ZFS source code, because it's probably easier to debug a filesystem in
userspace! He did express interest in the topic. Do you think that MacFUSE is
complete enough that it would be feasible to port the latest kernel code to it?
Thanks!
Dan Bethe
Complement, in congratulations for their successful beta release, and
for so heavily inspiring the community, I took the liberty of sending
a fruit sculpture to the office of Ten's Complement and I signed
"love, MacZFS" on behalf of the community of which they are going to
be a real member.
It has a big apple carved out of pineapple, for which ZFS is the
chocolate topping to finish it off ;) I wish I'd remembered to call
the place up and ask them to carve a bite out of the side of the
apple. But I did add a big "10" carved out of pineapple. I didn't
actually see it, but here's a basic picture from the web site:
http://i.imgur.com/0saFz.png
In addition to a "thank you" note, Don wrote yesterday,
"The open source strategy of Ten's Complement is still being
developed. In the future we will announce our plans.
We appreciate the enthusiasm of the MacZFS community, but we're just
not ready for a wiki since we haven't finished our open source hosting
strategy.
Currently we're busy building the infrastructure for the next beta —
it will include a forum and a wiki.
please hang tight
thanks
-Don"
Daniel Bethe
older zpools in read-only mode. You can import it using 'zpool import -o
readonly=off' but it'll lie to you.
"That was intentional. We took the conservative approach for mounting older
pools (like version 8). There are significant disk changes in the newer pool
format. We simply didn't have the resources to verify the effects of (a)
writing to older pools with the compatibility layer(s) and (b) the effects of
upgrading an older pool. Note that the upgrade process won't upgrade your old
disk format. So you end up with a hybrid pool of sorts. For optimal
performance, it will be better to create a new pool."
-- Don
Alex Blewitt
> The open source strategy of Ten's Complement is still being
> developed. In the future we will announce our plans.
>
> We appreciate the enthusiasm of the MacZFS community, but we're just
> not ready for a wiki since we haven't finished our open source hosting
> strategy.
I'm looking forward to it, even if it is piped through third parties rather than Don posting here (it's not like it's not an open group, after all).
As for needing dedicated infrastructure: if it's going to be open then GitHub is all you need. Most likely, the decision is based oh either making the kext free or paid for, rather than an infra issue. There's also additional GUI tools which might not be opened, which is fair enough.
But right now, it's even less open than it was when it was an official Apple project.
Alex
Daniel Bethe
> As for needing dedicated infrastructure: if it's going to be open then GitHub
>is all you need. Most likely, the decision is based oh either making the kext
>free or paid for, rather than an infra issue. There's also additional GUI tools
>which might not be opened, which is fair enough.
>
Yeah it seems to me that all ya need is a wiki, a web-backed mailing list or
three, a source repository, and a weblog.
> But right now, it's even less open than it was when it was an official Apple
>project.
>
Well. I wonder how long it was going on inside Apple before they got their junk
together enough that the public got anything from it. ^_^
Daniel Bethe
> Well. I wonder how long it was going on inside Apple before they got their
>junk
>
> together enough that the public got anything from it. ^_^
And now this is a far smaller group who is several days behind on responding to
some bug reports. My impression, as they've said, is that they're working as
hard as they can at moving mountains. I have sympathy for em and at this point,
I have a lot of trust (I also trust the law of the CDDL hehe). We also have
people here in this group who are holding on to source code *and* binaries of
interesting stuff for no good reason! ;-)