The French site Mac4Ever appears to have found evidence (in the newest developer release) that Leopard will include the ZFS file system to supplement HFS+. What is ZFS you ask, and why should you care? Well ZFS is a pretty darn cool next generation file system created by Sun that includes a variety of cool new features for protecting your data (if any file system features can properly be called "cool"). John Siracusa over at arstechnica has written about ZFS several times, rather excitedly. I'll let him explain what the excitement is about: "ZFS does away with the old restrictions on volume size and scope, while also addressing data integrity and performance issues, all from a purely software perspective. (Like one slide says, "ZFS loves cheap disks!")
The end game is a world where storage-even personal storage-actually behaves like the magically intelligent, infinitely expandable cloud that we'd all like to think it is, and less like those temperamental little cylinders (to use some diagram-speak, if I may). It's daring, free-thinking stuff."
If this is true and ZFS is in fact shipping with Leopard, it may go a long way towards explaining how Time Machine will work in the final release, despite the fact that in the original developer release Time Machine did not use ZFS. It would be yet another example of Apple being out on the edge and leading the mainstream PC industry (linux hackers don't count) forward.
[Via Digg through OSNews]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-17-2006 @ 3:27PM
Mike said...
Here is information from Sun on ZFS:
http://www.sun.com/2004-0914/feature/
Reply
12-17-2006 @ 3:44PM
anon said...
Here is a link that descries Apple's interest in ZFA back in April 2006.....
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2006-April/002119.html
For those who can't stomach Sun's page on ZFS here is the Wikipedia page.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
For HFS+ fans of those that hate change, fear not. This will surely be an option, like FAT32 is for disks in Disk Utility, but without proper support for NTFS and HFS+ or boot support, Apple is a long way from getting rid of HFS+ as it's main file system.
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12-17-2006 @ 4:41PM
michel said...
IF
and
IF
os X get ZFS
and
IF
time machine is changed to use ZFS properties, it would be awesome (automatically snapshot with a good gui to browse them ?!! I buy that 3 time)
and it will leading the mainstream PC industry AND linux developpers too forward.
but still I don't believe it. ZFS is a lot of _soon to be_ GPL source code to integrate with mac os X kernel and Time machine is not using special tricks of filesystems, just old good folders.
it's tricky legally and technically for apple folks. but well.. everything is possible in the Futuuuuure.
Reply
12-17-2006 @ 6:32PM
Travis L. said...
Unfortunatly the current build cannot have ZFS as the main partition type.
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12-17-2006 @ 9:08PM
akatsuki said...
ZFS is awesome. I will switch over and even go through the pain of a reformat if they let it be a boot drive option....
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12-18-2006 @ 12:37AM
Billifer said...
Mat, I used to work at Sun, at I tell ya, the only other person I know of who'd describe any file system as "pretty darn cool" is Scott McNealy himself. (He liked to call a lot of their technology "pretty darn cool," actually.)
I was a kernel developer, but I never worked on ZFS, or even knew about it when I was there. It does sound like an interesting innovation, though. More like an extension of VxFS than of UFS or HFS+.
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12-18-2006 @ 4:50AM
Ollivier Robert said...
After seeing a demo of the FreeBSD port of ZFS (one of the first
implementation on other OSes than Solaris), I want it. Not really for the
peta/zetabytes features (I don't have that large a disk array) but for
easiness of disk shiffling, builtin RAID features and so on.
It is probably not the best FS to have for a single disk machine like a laptop
but having a FS faster than HFS+/HFSX would be nice as well...
Reply
12-18-2006 @ 11:49AM
Sherman Homan said...
ZFS is indeed a cloud, a free-form extension of your computer, data seamlessly stored, free-floating, daring! Your personal files are not stored on your computer, they are stored everywhere, accessible everywhere.
What could possibly go wrong?
Uh, no thanks!
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