4 HN users recommended this talk4 months2016–2026score 5.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN recommends it as the definitive explanation of ZFS design straight from its inventors, with war stories about data integrity.
Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, the creators of ZFS, present 'ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems' at the 2008 SNIA Software Developers' Conference. They explain the design, including copy-on-write, checksumming and avoiding the write hole.
“I would recommend anybody interested in filesystems to watch Jeff Bonwick (ZFS inventor) explain the design of ZFS” (HN, 2016)
I would recommend anybody interested in filesystems to watch Jeff Bonwick (ZFS inventor) explain the design of ZFS: [this video] . They have a few very nice war stories explaining why they found it useful to have the user data checksummed as well.
ZFS inventor explains design, with war stories on checksumming
> Is ZFS any good? The presentation "ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems" from its debut in 2008 is a good introduction. Part 1 (of 3) probably best explains how different it is from just about anything else out there (even now, in 2019): * [this video] Part 2 show some extra niceties / features, and Part 3 is a demo and Q&A. Watching Part 1 at least is worth it for anyone curious; 2 and 3 are optional.
Explains how different ZFS is from other filesystems
Well, ZFS isn't exactly monolithic if you look under the hood: it has the ZPL (files, directories), DMU (objects, transactions on those objects), SPA (actual disk I/O). A potato-quality video from 2008 with Moore and Bonwick, the creators (timestamped to relevant section): * [this video]
Talk by ZFS creators, timestamped to architecture layers
> initial issues You mean like the current advice not to use anything except mirroring and striping (RAID-0/1/10)? > Parity may be inconsistent after a crash (the "write hole"). The problem born when after "an unclean shutdown" a disk failure happens. But these are two distinct failures. These together break the BTRFS raid5 redundancy. If you run a scrub process after "an unclean shutdown" (with no disk failure in between) those data which match their checksum can still be read out while the mismatched data are lost forever. * [link] I've been using ZFS since it came out on Solaris 10 over a decade ago and it was specifically designed not to have a write hole due to its COW/ACID nature. See this 2008 SNIA presentation from Bonwick and Moore, the creators of ZFS talking about not having a write hole: * ACID/COW: [this video] * Integrity: [this video]
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