dtrace.conf(16) wrap-up
Something that got a little lost in the excitement of Samsung’s recent acquisition of Joyent was dtrace.conf(16), our quadrennial (!) unconference on DTrace. The videos are up, and in the spirit of Adam Leventhal‘s excellent wrap-ups from dtrace.conf(08) and dtrace.conf(12), I wanted to provide a survey of the one-day conference and its content. Once again, [...]
Read more...APFS in Detail: Conclusions
This series of posts covers APFS, Apple’s new filesystem announced at WWDC 2016. See the first post for the table of contents. Summing Up I’m not sure Apple absolutely had to replace HFS+, but likely they had passed an inflection point where continuing to maintain and evolve the 30+ year old software was more expensive than building [...]
Read more...APFS in Detail: Data Integrity
This series of posts covers APFS, Apple’s new filesystem announced at WWDC 2016. See the first post for the table of contents. Data Integrity Arguably the most important job of a file system is preserving data integrity. Here’s my data, don’t lose it, don’t change it. If file systems could be trusted absolutely then the “only” reason [...]
Read more...In: APFS, checksums, RAID, software
APFS in Detail: Performance
This series of posts covers APFS, Apple’s new filesystem announced at WWDC 2016. See the first post for the table of contents. Performance APFS claims to be optimized for flash. Flash memory (NAND) is the stuff in your speedy SSD. Apple changed the computing industry when it put flash into the iPod and iPhone, volumes for which [...]
Read more...In: APFS, flash, FTL, NAND, performance, software, SSD, TRIM
APFS in Detail: Space Efficiency and Clones
This series of posts covers APFS, Apple’s new filesystem announced at WWDC 2016. See the first post for the table of contents. Space Efficiency A modern trend in file systems has been to store data more efficiently to effectively increase the size of your device. Common approaches include compression (which, as noted above, is very very likely [...]
Read more...In: APFS, snapshots, software
APFS in Detail: Encryption, Snapshots, and Backup
This series of posts covers APFS, Apple’s new filesystem announced at WWDC 2016. See the first post for the table of contents. Encryption Encryption is clearly a core feature of APFS. This comes from diverse requirements from the various devices, for example multiple keys within file systems on the iPhone or per-user keys on laptops. I heard [...]
Read more...APFS in Detail: Overview
Apple announced a new file system that will make its way into all of its OS variants (macOS, tvOS, iOS, watchOS) in the coming years. Media coverage to this point has been mostly breathless elongations of Apple’s developer documentation. With a dearth of detail I decided to attend the presentation and Q&A with the APFS [...]
Read more...ZFS: Apple’s New Filesystem That Wasn’t
Prologue (2006) I attended my first WWDC in 2006 to participate in Apple’s launch of their DTrace port to the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). Apple completed all but the fiddliest finishing touches without help from the DTrace team. Even when they did meet with us we had no idea that they were mere [...]
Read more...Finding What’s Next
After nearly nine years at Sun and then six at Delphix I’m looking for the next technology, team, and market to dive into. I’ve had the extremely good fortune of working with three groups—the DTrace team, Fishworks at Sun, and Delphix—that featured top-tier technologists working on differentiated products, each of them a wonderful place and [...]
Read more...Big News for ZFS on Linux
Canonical announced a few weeks ago that ZFS will be included in the next release of Ubuntu Linux, on by default and fully supported. And it’s no exaggeration when Dustin Kirkland describes ZFS as “one of the most exciting new features Linux has seen in a very long time.” In the words of our 47th [...]
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