On Thu, Nov 17, 2005 at 11:05:17PM -0700, Michael Torrie wrote: > Well, that has suddenly changed with the announcement of Sun's > uber-fs, ZFS [1]. I only have just a small inkling of what ZFS is > all about, and I get the feeling this is really big. Actually huge. > This is a major advancement in free unix distros. In my mind this > is as huge as xen is going to be.
That's some pretty good Kool-Aid, ain't it, Michael? :-) http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113242108929933&w=2 And the PDF presentation on the page you linked to reeks of marketing hype: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/zfs_last.pdf Slide 19 is just ridiculous. They totally misapplied Moore's Law to justify their 128-bit address space design decision; those who actually read Moore's paper would know that Moore's Law actually refers to the density of functional components on silicon devices, not the density of magnetic domains on hard disk platters. They are entirely different technologies with entirely different trends. Incurring the overhead of a 128-bit address space and justifying it by saying that it will be needed a couple of decades from now is the same class of fallacy as incurring the cost of a 512-bit symmetric key while making wild conjectures about computational power a couple of decades from now. That ``exceeds quantum limit of earth-based storage'' claim is pure marketing babblespeak that has no bearing on real-life problems in the marketplace, like those caused by eating up a whole 128 bits for every address you need to pass around in ZFS. It looks like ZFS took a page out of a book on good database design and processor architecture design, and then they mushed them together and called it a filesystem. How much more useful is ZFS over our current technologies, that we should throw it all away? As long as we have to throw away our traditional notions of block devices, inodes, dentries, and so on (which, by the way, is not a unique concept by any means -- see Object Stores by IBM Haifa labs <http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/projects/storage/objectstore/>), why not just go all the way and extend Reiser4 with the volume-less capability? I agree that we could do better, and ZFS looks like a step in the right direction, but I would be skeptical of any suggestion that it is the best alternative we have at the moment. Mike (Disclaimer: I speak for myself and not necessarily my employer.) .___________________________________________________________________. Michael A. Halcrow Security Software Engineer, IBM Linux Technology Center GnuPG Fingerprint: 419C 5B1E 948A FA73 A54C 20F5 DB40 8531 6DCA 8769 A hacker does for love what others would not do for money.
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
/* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
