On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 06:17:44PM -0500, Haudy Kazemi wrote: > I'm wondering what are some use cases for ZFS's utf8only and > normalization properties. They are off/none by default, and can only be > set when the filesystem is created. When should they specifically be > enabled and/or disabled? (i.e. Where is using them a really good idea? > Where is using them a really bad idea?)
These are for interoperability. The world is converging on Unicode for filesystem object naming. If you want to exclude non-Unicode strings then you should set utf8only (some non-Unicode strings in some codesets can look like valid UTF-8 though). But Unicode has multiple canonical and non-canonical ways of representing certain characters (e.g., ´). Solaris and Windows input methods tend to conform to NFKC, so they will interop even if you don't enable the normalization feature. But MacOS X normalizes to NFD. Therefore, if you need to interoperate with MacOS X then you should enable the normalization feature. > Looking forward, starting with Windows XP and OS X 10.5 clients, is > there any reason to change the defaults in order to minimize problems? You should definetely enable normalization (see above). It doesn't matter what normalization form you use, but "nfd" runs faster than "nfc". The normalization feature doesn't cost much if you use all US-ASCII file names. And it doesn't cost much if your file names are mostly US-ASCII. Nico -- _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
