Touchless filesystem migration

Quicksearch

Disclaimer

The individual owning this blog works for Oracle in Germany. The opinions expressed here are his own, are not necessarily reviewed in advance by anyone but the individual author, and neither Oracle nor any other party necessarily agrees with them.

Navigation

< Gewitter | Miss World? >

Touchless filesystem migration

Sunday, June 10. 2007

Sun may be one of the masters in innovating IT, but Apple is certainly the undisputed master in making it trivial to use such innovations. One example: Apple has patented "touchless migration" of filesystems. This patent leverages the fact, that almost all filesystems do the same stuff: Storing and organizing data blocks. The simple, but really brilliant idea: Keeping the data blocks, leaving it untouched and write a new set of meta data around it. Voila, filesystem converted, without the backup-format-restore-cycle. Even without copying the data. So the migration should be really fast. An with the inclusion of ZFS into 10.5 such migrations will happen soon on millions of computers.

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in Apple, English at 07:51 | Comments (5) | Trackback (1)

Defined tags for this entry: 10.5

, apple

, filesystems

, storage

, zfs

Related entries by tags:

View as PDF: This entry | This month | Full blog

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

vxconvert and Apples Touchless filesystem migration
Christian pointed me to an interesting fact: The proposed mechanism of the touchless filesystem migration looks really similar to the mechanism of used in the vxfsconvert. From the vxfsconverter(1M) manpage for HP-SUX (The feature is available on other pl

Weblog: c0t0d0s0.org
Tracked: Jun 12, 11:16

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Natürlich ist die Hälfte eines Dateisystems (die untere Hälfte genau genommen) über die Anordnung von Daten auf der Platte. Man hat also ein Dateisystem, daß formal im neuen Format ist, aber immer noch so angeordnet ist und so performt wie das alte Format.

#1 Isotopp (Homepage) on 2007-06-10 09:08 (Reply)

Ich glaube allerdings, das der Grossteil der Schwächen von HFS+ in der oberen Hälfte sind. Ausserdem: Es löst das Problem der massenhaft anstehenden Migration, das mit 10.5 ansteht. Anders als bei vielen anderen Betriebsystem sind die Applenutzer meist ein wenig upgradefreundiger ...

#1.1 Joerg (Homepage) on 2007-06-10 12:04 (Reply)

Joerg,

How do you think ZFS fits with flash disks and portable devices? I think they is another big win for ZFS and Apple.

Robin

#2 Robin Harris (Homepage) on 2007-06-10 11:42 (Reply)

In my opinion there are some neat tricks possible with ZFS. For example replacing the least used disk priority in the block allocator with a last recently used block priority to circumvent flash wearout. Or TimeMachine for mobiles ...

#2.1 Joerg (Homepage) on 2007-06-10 12:09 (Reply)

AFAIK that's nothing new. Veritas has a tool to automatically convert from UFS to their own VXFS. Nothing to be done except that the Admin has to enter the command, with the path to the device as argument.

#3 Christian (Homepage) on 2007-06-12 10:26 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications. To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above: Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_.
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry