[geeks] Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris bits to be in next version of OSX

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 @ 20:47 +1000, Scott Howard said:

> Volume managers were only ever a hack - they were something to allow us
> to get around the limitations of a single slice in the days when
> filesystems didn't have the smarts to do anything more than write to a
> single device.

There is some truth to that, but not all LVM is a hack, where hack ==
"bad code".

LVM has merits outside of just providing a missing filesystem feature.

> Unfortunately once someone invented the volume manager we all forgot
> they they were a hack, and started relying on them.  The correct solution
> was always going to be to create a filesystem that was smart enough to
> handle more than a single device - it just took a long time for someone
> to do it.
> 
> So ZFS is a filesystem - that's all.  It just happens to be a filesystem
> that is smart enough that it has no need for a Volume Manager hack  layer
> living between it and the disk.

ZFS has volume management built in, which doesn't make it any more or
less of a "hack", and doesn't make it suddenly non-existent either.

Sun probably has a vested interest in creating a single utopian
filesystem that does it all, but not everyone shares that vision.



-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["People should have access to the data which
you have about them.  There should be a process for them to challenge any
inaccuracies." -- Arthur Miller]