Steve is gonna be mad. You remember all those secret features that Leopard is supposed to have? And how Steve is going to wow us all with them at WWDC? Well, it looks like a little birdie, in the form of a big tech company's CEO, just let the whole world into one of those secrets. Mac Rumors points out that Jonathan Schwartz told an audience at a Sun event that the default filesystem in Leopard will be ZFS. We've known for awhile that Leopard will support ZFS, so that wasn't too shocking. This is the first anyone has heard about ZFS being the default filesystem for Leopard though. Why is this a big deal? Well, ZFS is a filesystem that Sun built from the groundup to address modern needs at the filesystem level. ZFS is a 128bit filesystem meaning it can theoretically hold up to 16 exabytes worth of information across multiple devices (an exabyte, in case you don't know, is about 1,073,741,824 gigabytes so the ZFS can hold 17,179,869,184 GB of data though that would be many, many harddrives). Wikipedia has a full explanation of ZFS, which highlights all the cool features.
I suppose we'll all find out on Monday.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-06-2007 @ 11:33PM
Adam said...
I don't want to be *that guy*, but it's ZFS.
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6-06-2007 @ 11:36PM
Scott McNulty said...
Thanks for being that guy! At least I got it right in the title. :)
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6-06-2007 @ 11:48PM
Wheels said...
I bet Uncle Steve gave Uncle Jonathan his blessing. After all, all this can do is build hype for WWDC. This doesn't blow anything, from were I stand...well, sit... For me it says "wow, that's pretty big, what else do they have up their sleeve?".
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6-06-2007 @ 11:51PM
Gerald Buckley said...
No, Scott, I think we found out today... And, it's not like Jonathan outed "Illuminous" or anything like that. ZFS, while cool, isn't going to set our world on edge. That's reserved for the real distortion field content.
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6-06-2007 @ 11:58PM
fredouil said...
i would be nice, but zfs is very unlikely to be ported on PPC.
by the way i dont believe that zfs can be a main filesystem yet, it is too early, it is still full of bug.
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6-07-2007 @ 12:36AM
schlomo said...
ZFS makes sense as the main FS choice due to the snapshot feature - that would make Time Machine a real killer .app!
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6-07-2007 @ 2:05AM
Colin said...
Jenny, your insightful comments and helpful links are a boon to every single blog you post on. Thanks for all your hard work.
(Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.)
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6-07-2007 @ 2:53AM
Douglas F Shearer said...
I'd be doubtful if ZFS was the default file system, especially since the Solaris/OpenSolaris has yet to produce a stable method to use ZFS as the primary boot partition.
Maybe Apple Engineers have worked their magic tough.
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6-07-2007 @ 4:47AM
mark said...
if i read the wikipedia article on ZFS correctly, we'll finally be able to use colons in file names. this is great news for pro musicians who need to work with SMPTE numbers. (geeky, but true.) :-)
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6-07-2007 @ 5:49AM
Alex said...
The (theoretical, remember) upper disk size for ZFS is indeed 16 exabytes, but that's the same as the upper limit for HFS+, the filesystem you're probably using on your mac right now. Volume size isn't what makes ZFS special, so far's I know.
Also, the 'no colon in file names' (actually the prohibition is the traditional Unix ban on slashes, but the Finder displays all colons in file names as slashes and writes slashes as colons to keep things backwards compatible with Classic) isn't a limitation of HFS+, which allows any Unicode character in file names. The limitation is created by other parts of the OS, for backwards compatibility purposes, and so is unlikely to go away.
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6-07-2007 @ 6:54AM
andy said...
zfs will possibly be used for time machine but is not yet ready for boot disks, sun dont even use it for boot disks, its good but not yet mature
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6-07-2007 @ 8:14AM
Sietepestes said...
The real advantage in ZFS, since no one has pointed it out, is that it is a zero tolerance FS for data loss. Which means its like having a Raid 5 on your HD without using 5 Hard Drives. Which is why, Time Machine would become indeed a killer app.
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6-07-2007 @ 9:20AM
b-b00gie said...
Apple, Inc. is porting ZFS to their Mac OS X operating system, according to a post by a Sun employee on the opensolaris.org zfs-discuss mailing list, and previewed screenshots of the next version of Apple's Mac OS X. As of Mac OS X 10.5 (Developer Seed 9A321), support for ZFS has been included, but lacks the ability to act as a root partition. Also, attempts to format local drives using ZFS are unsuccessful; this is a known bug. On June 6th 2007, Sun's CEO Jonathan I. Schwartz publicly announced, days before Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference, that Apple will be making ZFS "the" filesystem in OS 10.5 Leopard. Marc Hamilton, VP for Solaris Marketing later wrote to clarify that, in his opinion, Apple is planning to use ZFS in future versions of Mac OS X, but not necessarily as the default filesystem for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
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6-07-2007 @ 9:48AM
danalog said...
zfs CAN be installed as root system: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/on/flag-days/pages/2007032801/
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6-07-2007 @ 12:18PM
coyotej said...
re: PPC - given that Leopard is not x86-only [as of now], ZFS is most definitely ported to it. Filesystem code is generally quite portable as it is.
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6-07-2007 @ 2:27PM
Michael said...
b-b00gie. Don't plagiarize.
At the very least, place quotes around text you copied from another source, then name your source in the same post (preferably a link to the source page).
If people haven't visited the wiki page you copied that text from, they may get the wrong impression, and quote you and your post as the authoritative source for the information.
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6-07-2007 @ 9:38PM
oj said...
so basically youd need 16 million 1 ter. hard drives to max this out
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