Mac OSX 10.5, HFS+ needs an upgrade

9Sep/090

Mac OSX 10.5, HFS+ needs an upgrade

Recently i’ve been having problems with Finder and HFS+ in the simple process of copying files over my network. First a little background. This all started with Project De-clutter as I have a bunch of dvds sitting in a corner that I wanted to rip and store on my ZFS fileserver (this running OpenSolaris). It’s roughly 120+ dvds and the process itself has been slow in ripping via Handbrake and then moving them over to my Popcorn hour A-100 via 100Mb which is dog slow but it’s not like I am moving these movies everyday (at least until this is complete). So the schedule is to keep myself on a 2-4 dvd a day ripping process.

That said the problem isn’t in the ripping even though we’ve had some issues there. The main problem is that HFS+ locks up the file and doesn’t release the lock. This is caused by I believe a couple of things all interacting at once. It seems if you have Time Machine running in the background while ripping a dvd the resulting file will be checked a couple of times if it’s locked by a process. Once the lock is released it then begins the backup of that file; there is an obvious window of time for this and the amount of times polled before it gives up is unknown. If you begin a copy of the file Finder will begin copying and eventually popup an error that the file is either in use or an unknown error has occurred. I’m just not sure about how it all exactly works yet but it’s quite annoying.

This led into me ripping straight to the zfs fileserver which is on a gigabit switch so slightly faster but still sub-optimal. So I remember having some inklings about ZFS on OSX and thought maybe i’d try that and low and behold it seems it was already on my system. With one caveat; I’d have to download the full ZFS read/write kext.

AppleJolly-Rancher-MacPro:~ christopherwarner$ sudo zpool Password: ZFS Readonly implemntation is loaded! To download the full ZFS read/write kext with all functionality enabled, please go to http://developer.apple.com Read-Only ZFS Implementation missing command usage: zpool command args ... where 'command' is one of the following:

list [-H] [-o field[,field]*] [pool] ...
iostat [-v] [pool] ... [interval [count]]
status [-vx] [pool] ...

online <pool> <device> ...
offline [-t] <pool> <device> ...

scrub [-s] <pool> ...

import [-d dir] [-D]
import [-d dir] [-D] [-f] [-o opts] [-R root] -a
import [-d dir] [-D] [-f] [-o opts] [-R root ] </pool> <pool | id> [newpool]

history [</pool> <pool>]</pool></device></pool></device></pool>

Nice, I have a terabyte drive laying about somewhere, I’m sure. Although I was planning to upgrade to Snow Leopard at some point in the near future. Seeing as I haven’t heard of any major regressions in the first week seemed like a good time to lose yet another night of sleep and push this De-clutter project forward. Turns out, ZFS is missing from Snow Leopard and no one is saying anything on the issue. I suspect this has a lot to do with the fact that Oracle purchased Sun and Apple doesn’t want to find themselves in an untenable position. Also, considering Snow Leopard was supposed to be a clean up release it wouldn’t have made sense, it’s still not stable. So the decision which ever way it went is understandable.

Unfortunately because HFS+ sucks i’ll have to revert to ZFS on Opensolaris over a gig connect if I’m going to upgrade. This filesystem situation at this point is only going to become worst with time. Not just for myself but for lots of people who are now consolidating their content. Hopefully; something is done.

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