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Sun CEO Says ZFS Will Be 'the File System' for OSX
Fjan11 writes "Sun's Jonathan Schwartz has announced that Apple will be making ZFS 'the file system' in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. It's possible that Leopard's Time Machine feature will require ZFS to run, because ZFS has back-up and snapshots build right in to the filesystem as well as a host of other features. 'Rumors of Apple's interest in ZFS began in April 2006, when an OpenSolaris mailing list revealed that Apple had contacted Sun regarding porting ZFS to OS 10. The file system later began making appearances in Leopard builds. ZFS has a long list of improvements over Apple's current file system, Journaled HFS+.'"
When ZFS was first mentioned in the same breath as OS X it was pointed out that at the time you couldn't boot off ZFS file systems, so people were thinking it would power external (or secondary) timemachine devices. If it's replacing everything, I'm assuming you can now boot from a ZFS drive? When was this functionality added?
Once we're sure it's stable, because it looks like a massive improvement over the 1970s-style file systems we're using now. ZFS is now part of FreeBSD, Solaris will have ZFS "soon" and many Linux distros are also considering it. Good. Let's get to a common standard that's excellent and forget the tedium of these past, less effective file systems.
technical writing / development
The first bootable release of ZFS (not "BUILD," but "RELEASE") isn't even due until the Fall.
OSX 10.5 ain't due 'til Fall, either.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
as a worker at sun and having used ZFS and playing with it constantly , it is a good File system , I appreciate the little things it has and it has brought data stability to a whole new level. I think personally that this will be a defining moment for ZFS , it will be linux ready soon ( at the same level of stability that the mac will enjoy ) and it will take off and become more of a standard for unix and linux boxes.
To bad no windows port is available. It would be nice to see my unix drives from windows.
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
If you were a Mac User you realize that Apple does stuff like this a lot, and they are quite good at it too.
The Move from Classic (OS 9) to OS X forced people to Recompile/Port or Die from obsoleteness modernized almost all the software for Mac OS X. This removed a lot of Old Hacky code from the code base and forced developers to follow a more modern programming style.
Next it was the move from Power PC to Intel. This once again required a full recompile but this time is assured that the recompile was with their own development tools. So more hacky code was removed and replaced with more standardized system calls.
Now with ZFS on Mac OS X it is more likely that most things will work just fine with ZFS because Apple Knows what most of the calls to the OS will be. And the bulk of the legicy code has been updated.
Windows, Linux and traditional Unix OS Devlopers don't normally Break Compatibility so often so their hacks to work around a shortfall in an OLD version of the OS holds threw to the following versions of their software on newer versions of the OS. So migrating OS ZFS on Linux is much more risky then moving to ZFS on OS X.
But it is a trade off of getting Modern Software and paying more $$$ for the software. or Pay less for the software but make it hard to upgrade to a better system in the future.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Seems like Apple take some of the best ideas from the Unix world. Really shows the potential of Unix systems if the people who wrote them thought a little more about usability.