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]
