Sun exec: ZFS to be default file system in Apples’ Mac OS X Leopard

Mac Daily News ^ | 06/06/2007

[Swordmaker]

"Perhaps overcome with excitement (and forgetting that Apple doesn't like such pre-emptive disclosures), Sun's Jonathan Schwartz announced today at Sun event in Washington D.C. that Apple would be making ZFS 'the file system' in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard (video link, requires RealPlayer)," longofest reports for MacRumors.

In fact, this week you'll see that Apple is announcing at their Worldwide Developer Conference that ZFS has become the file system in Mac OS 10.

longofest reports, "ZFS has a long list of improvements over Apple's current file system, Journaled HFS+."

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Yes! If true — and it certainly sounds true — this is quite a big deal and qualifies as a major Leopard feature. And Windows will immediately become even more archaic, if that's even possible.

Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris.org describes ZFS:

ZFS is a new kind of filesystem that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to use.

[Swordmaker]

Sun annouces that Mac OSX.5 Leopard will be sporting a new 128 bit file system... ZFS... which can store 18 billion billion (18.4 × 10¹⁸) times more data than current 64-bit systems. PING!

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[goldstategop]

I wonder if it will run on a PPC Mac?

[IslandJeff]

Um, how much hardware is this thing going to require?

Exhibit A: Win Vista

[rom]

I would bet on it.

[Covenantor]

Am I correct in surmising that this can have a very large impact the server market? Very large ?

[snowsislander]

Um, how much hardware is this thing going to require?

From what I have read, I don't think it takes much hardware to support ZFS; if anything, it is probably less complex than the current melange of layers of volume managers and filesystems. Apparently it's already been ported directly to FreeBSD, and I believe that you can also run it in some fashion under Fuse on Linux.

[George W. Bush]

These tidbits don't do justice to ZFS. The snapshotting (Time Machine), the ability to add drives to a system pool and expand its size (need another 500GB, just plug in a drive and issue a command), its Z-RAID (use two or more drives in parallel), its write-once nature, how it stores file checksums in the directory structure one directory higher than the file itself.

And how it actually can reconstruct files on failed drives or when you've had bit-rot (a problem with new large drives where data just changes for no good reason) is just flat-out amazing.

It's a dream of a filesystem. And big enough to last even the largest users for another 20 years.

[SlowBoat407]

I’d buy a mac but...

I just bought one.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

I wonder if it will run on a PPC Mac?

I think Leopard is supposed to run natively on both flavors of Mac.

I never upgraded to Tiger, and since I don't do anything more challenging on this Mac than a trivial spreadsheet, I don't actually need a shiny new computer or even a new OS. But I think at some point ya hafta find out what the noise is about . . .

Off topic a bit, Walter Mossberg's advice column in the WSJ today quotes Steve Jobs to the effect that the iPhone will not be capable of accepting third-party software out of the box on June 29 - but that "that is our intent," and he expects it to happen by the end of the year.

[Terpfen]

What about Windows Vista? How does that relate to a Sun-developed filesystem? (If you’re referencing WinFS, it got axed.)

ZFS will actually improve system performance when doing data-intensive tasks, like loading iPhoto.

[MrsEmmaPeel]

You don’t know what you are talking about.

[George W. Bush]

Emma, you're right here.

This will have, at most, the kind of impact we see from software RAID. In fact, in an era of multicore processors, this is a perfect use for the excess CPU power that developers are having problems using efficiently.

So ZFS has come along at the right time to match up with the underused CPU power the new multicore CPUs offer.

For those who brought it up, yes, ZFS will work just fine on PPC Macs. Leopard is developed on Xcode which generates solid binaries for both CPU families (PPC and Intel). Apple will continue to support PPC for at least three more years.

[antiRepublicrat]

It's coming. BTW, cute one from that article:

A pundit as unlikely as Arianna Huffington sought out Mr. Jobs directly for advice on being the first to score a phone. (He told her to go to an AT&T store.)

*grin*

[zeugma]

These tidbits don't do justice to ZFS.

Indeed. ZFS is absolutely going to rock as a filesystem. I can't wait for it to make headroads into Linux space.

Too bad MS so ruled by the NIH syndrome that they won't support more than just FAT/FAT32/NTFS.

 

[TheBattman]

YEs it will. File system support is a factor of the OS, not of the hardware itself.

[TheBattman]

Win Vista is hardware?

[Uri’el-2012]

See ZFS for more information about the filesystem.

[SunkenCiv]

“actually a pleasure to use” — that goes for anything that doesn’t lose files. If the small files are stored in their actual size, rather than some system minimum, that will be an improvement. :’)

[IslandJeff]

Why hello to you, too. Which is why I ASKED.