Filed under: OS, Rumors, WWDC, Apple, Leopard
ZFS to be the default file system in Leopard?
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.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Adam said 11:33PM on 6-06-2007
I don't want to be *that guy*, but it's ZFS.
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Scott McNulty said 11:36PM on 6-06-2007
Thanks for being that guy! At least I got it right in the title. :)
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Wheels said 11:48PM on 6-06-2007
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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Gerald Buckley said 11:51PM on 6-06-2007
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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fredouil said 11:58PM on 6-06-2007
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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schlomo said 12:36AM on 6-07-2007
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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Colin said 2:05AM on 6-07-2007
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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mark said 4:47AM on 6-07-2007
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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Douglas F Shearer said 2:53AM on 6-07-2007
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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Alex said 5:49AM on 6-07-2007
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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andy said 6:54AM on 6-07-2007
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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Sietepestes said 8:14AM on 6-07-2007
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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b-b00gie said 9:20AM on 6-07-2007
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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danalog said 9:48AM on 6-07-2007
zfs CAN be installed as root system: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/on/flag-days/pages/2007032801/
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coyotej said 12:18PM on 6-07-2007
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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Michael said 2:27PM on 6-07-2007
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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oj said 9:38PM on 6-07-2007
so basically youd need 16 million 1 ter. hard drives to max this out
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