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.

[Golden Eagle]

ZFS comes from Sun Solaris Unix which isn’t license compatible with Linux like OSX is. You’ll have to run it outside the kernel through some sort of compatbility layer that kills overall performance. I’d recommend a full switch from Linux to OSX, Solaris, or BSD instead so you can run it natively and leave those GPL headaches behind, apparently they’re only going to get worse when version 3 comes out.

[zeugma]

All posts by Golden Eagle have been Blocked, to view posts by this person you must edit the FRTrollBlocker.user.js file.

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 Awesome! Thanks!

Need to work on a filter for the "My Comments" page too :-)

[6SJ7]

Interesting article on ZFS.

From the article...
ZFS is a 128-bit file system, so it can store 18 billion billion (18.4 × 1018) times more data than current 64-bit systems. The limitations of ZFS are designed to be so large that they will not be encountered in practice for some time.

OK. Got it. Big. Really big!

[Uri’el-2012]

Thanks for the trip down memory lane with ol' Shep

[George W. Bush]

All posts by Golden Eagle have been Blocked, to view posts by this person you must edit the FRTrollBlocker.user.js file.

I thought my Firefox extension for FreeRepublic (FRstyle) was the only project around so far.

Have you guys produced some Javascript for FR?

BTW, I have user-blocking and user-highlighting in my extension already. But my blocklist is very short now, ever since the banning of the Julietrolls.

my project (includes some screenshots): GeoCities - FRstyle

I've been slacking lately on new code and trying to refactor my sloppy Javascript but I am still looking for new testers and hopefully a few coders to help out.

[theFIRMbss]

>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

So, since the iPhone
runs the MacOS, I can
store the phone numbers

of every woman
on the planet in my phone...
I will need speed dial!

[George W. Bush]

Actually, you could store a 3MP PNG picture file of every woman who has ever lived and barely dent the storage capacity.

But not on the iPhone.

[Golden Eagle]

No telling what they’re up to, but if running a bolted-on ZFS filesystem from userspace is what they call I good idea I’m obviously better off not knowing LOL.

[theFIRMbss]

>Actually, you could store a 3MP PNG picture file of every woman who has ever lived

(Lately I have been
thinking about block storage
in old Forth systems

and wondering if
"file systems" are obsolete.
Today's transfer speeds

are blazingly fast
and the combination of
thumb drives and 'net drives

makes it so easy
to store stuff all chunked up and
distributed that

I'm not sure we need
one big central storage box.
I think now we need

some standardized way
to organize and access
our non-filed storage--

all the stuff we've saved
chunked up in thumbs and the 'net.
Block storage was cool

because programmers
were forced to impose a scheme
of order to it.)

[zeugma]

I’ve seen that some folks have been working on laptops with no hard drive. They come with a 32MB card of some kind instead. (CF, SD or something like that) That pretty much rocks IMO. Getting rid of the HD is one less thing to generate heat, and I’d imagine you’d have it set up in such a way that you could just yank the card out when you’re not using it. That way, if someone stole your laptop, they’d get no data.

[George W. Bush]

No telling what they’re up to, but if running a bolted-on ZFS filesystem from userspace is what they call I good idea I’m obviously better off not knowing LOL.

Party-pooper!

The whole userspace thing is cool. We're using userspace filesystems on the Mac now to use SSH, Flickr, GoogleMail, etc. all as filesystems.

I admit, I wouldn't use it in a production server. But we're talking about personal computers so it's not a big concern. BTW, I still won't run the NTFS filesystem in userspace. Just don't trust it not to screw my NTFS external hard drives.

[George W. Bush]

Block storage was cool

No, it wasn't.

I speak as someone who wrote an entire Forth interpreter with hi-res graphics and sound support and a mini-assembler in 6502 assembly language on a Commodore 64. This was in the mid-Eighties and it was written to support some projects a friend of mine was doing in hardware. Stuff like sound digitizers and voice synthesizers back when ADC/DAC stuff was new and fun for electronics hobbyists.

Not cool. Not even close. Fortunately, I did away with the entire block system in my version. It always was brain dead.

[Golden Eagle]

Those are remote resources, not a local FS. Fact remains Linux users won’t have native access to ZFS like Apple, Solaris or BSD users will, thanks to their prohibitive license.

[George W. Bush]

We'll see. I can't believe that Linux will remain without a true ZFS filesystem for long. Sun wants it the community to embrace it. Well, maybe not Microsoft. :)

They really have been very generous with ZFS (though it's in their own interest). I think it is a contribution to open-source greater than even some of the really nice stuff that IBM gave to the Linux and open-source folks. And, at the time, I thought they were generous as well.

[Terpfen]

ZFS filesystem

Hey now, don't let Golden Eagle's redundancies rub off on you. (The FS in ZFS stands for File System.)

[George W. Bush]

(The FS in ZFS stands for File System.)

As long as we don't start fighting over what the Z stands for. This isn't Slashdot.

[Terpfen]

This isn't Slashdot.

Thankfully.

[reg45]

With existing machines, you will have to repartition and reformat your hard disks.

[MrsEmmaPeel]

Sorry, didn't read Exhibit A: Win Vista as a question

[George W. Bush]

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.

One of the interesting things about ZFS is that it combines the file manager and filesystem. And FUSE has been ported to the Mac by one of the top Google guys. macfuse - Google Code