Bsd Now

We explain the physics behind ZFS, DTrace switching to the GPL, Emacs debugging, syncookies coming to PF & FreeBSD’s history on EC2. This episode was brought to you by Headlines 128 bit storage: Are you high? (https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/128-bit-storage:-are-you-high) For people who have heard about ZFS boiling oceans and wonder where that is coming from, we dug out this old piece from 2004 on the blog of ZFS co-creator Jeff Bonwick, originally from the Sun website. 64 bits would have been plenty ... but then you can't talk out of your ass about boiling oceans then, can you? Well, it's a fair question. Why did we make ZFS a 128-bit storage system? What on earth made us think it's necessary? And how do we know it's sufficient? Let's start with the easy one: how do we know it's necessary? Some customers already have datasets on the order of a petabyte, or 2^50 bytes. Thus the 64-bit capacity limit of 2^64 bytes is only 14 doublings away. Moore's Law for storage predicts that capacity will continue to dou