ZFS for OS X

ZFS for OS X has had a long, and mostly made up history. Rumors that Apple was going to make ZFS the default file system for Leopard were incorrect, but they did make our lives a little more interesting, right? For those of you who aren't in the file system know, ZFS is a next generation open source file system developed by Sun (remember when they claimed to be the dot in the dotcom? Ah, memories.). Geeks much smarter than you or I are very exicted about the flexible way that ZFS treats storage, and the clever tricks that it does to ensure data integrity.

Now all that fun can be on your Mac, thanks to the ZFS project on Mac OS Forge (that's the open source repository for OS X that Apple hosts). ZFS binaries and source code are available for you should you want to tinker with it. There are some issues with it, like you can't empty the Trash using the graphical interface, and if you remove a USB drive that is part of a ZFS pool before running a command it'll kernel panic your machine. This stuff isn't for the faint of heart, but for those uber-geeks out there this is a must download.

[via Daring Fireball]

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ZFS for OS X has had a long, and mostly made up history. Rumors that Apple was going to make ZFS the default file system for Leopard were...

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Fritz, I said 'suggests', i.e. 'implies'. I know it doesn't say that it's going to be a feature of 10.6, but it suggests that they want it to be.

January 14 2008 at 7:44 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to Ed's comment

Fritz Laurel

Right, I just want to make sure it's clear the "they" refers to the developers of this project and not Apple. And since "they" are not Apple, "their" desires are meaningless.

Cheers,
FL

January 14 2008 at 4:43 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

tonyk

Acutally Fritz, this *is* an official Apple project, so "their" desires are not "meaningless". If you look at the project pages, you will notice that it says "Hosted by Apple" and "Copyright 2006 Apple", that al the other projects hosted are official Apple open-source projects, and if you browse the source, all of the committers have @apple.com email addresses.

January 14 2008 at 8:59 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Pascal

ZFS has been available as read-only in every leopard install, and as read-write for everyone via a developer beta (free registration). The big news is that Apple is much more transparent now about what they plan to do with it (boot support etc).
It's great to see that ZFS is maturing on the mac: for example, it allows you to do the equivalent of RAID 5 and RAID 6 in software, which is currently not supported any other way.
Also, it's simply a superior file system ;)
If you plan to use this, please make sure to read the documentation, test your setup on an empty drive, and remember to scrub your pools every now and then.

January 14 2008 at 6:50 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tim

And... Apple trivializes their work when they release Leopard 10.5.2 this Tuesday, which has full ZFS compatibility built in and enabled by default.

-You heard it here first.

January 14 2008 at 12:36 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Tim's comment

bug

Psssst...umm Tim, this is Apples implementation of ZFS. MacForge is where they host their open source projects like darwin, xnu, et al. This is hinted at by the developers '@apple.com' email address on the site posted. So there probably won't be any trivializing going on tuesday, but i am glad i heard it here first.

January 14 2008 at 1:42 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

ColonelSmith

Thanks for the info Ed

January 14 2008 at 12:13 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

From the FAQ it seems that they're going to integrate it into the next version, or sooner:

"However our goal is to be able to have it available for the next OS X release and sooner if we can."

They also mention trying to get some other changes made to support it to be released in a future leopard update.

January 14 2008 at 12:13 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Ed's comment

Fritz Laurel

I suggest you read the FAQ again. That quote is in reference to the question of booting off of ZFS, not ZFS in OSX.

Also, remember that this is an open source project and not an official part of OSX. Any talk of it being released as an official part of OSX (or a timeframe for that) is mere conjecture unless it comes through official channels from Apple.

Although, the fact that a former Sun ZFS developer is now working at Apple is indeed interesting.

Cheers,
FL

January 14 2008 at 2:38 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

moo

Do we think that Apple is going to add this to the OS or is it going to continue to be something for people like us only?

January 13 2008 at 11:59 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jon Williams

Looks like there's already some support or stubs for support in place, from vanilla-latest Leopard (maybe I'm special because I have Developer tools):

/System/Library/Filesystems/zfs.fs
/System/Library/Extensions/zfs.readonly.kext
/usr/lib/libzfs.dylib
/usr/sbin/zfs
/usr/share/man/man8/zfs.8
/usr/share/man/man8/zfs.util.8

Probably just read_only support so we won't complain about getting at ZFS stuff from our old machines, etc.

January 13 2008 at 11:35 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Jon Williams's comment

Sparks

Read-only ZFS support is part of Leopard; the read-only portion has been pretty well tested and is figured as solid.

Read/write ZFS support is still in beta, and Apple has their code publicly available as this article notes. (The precompiled and nicely-installable binary package of this read/write beta driver is available for free from the ADC downloads, as well, and has been since Leopard came out.)

January 14 2008 at 2:37 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply