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Apple Confirms No (Default) ZFS In Leopard
javipas writes "Despite recent rumors about the possible inclusion of ZFS as the filesystem of choice for MacOS X 10.5 'Leopard', an Apple executive has denied this possibility. Brian Croll, senior director of product marketing for the Mac OS has as much as said 'ZFS is not happening ... Croll declined to comment on statements made last week by Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz, who said the use of ZFS would be announced at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Upon further questioning, Croll would only confirm that Apple had never said ZFS would be a part of Leopard. A representative with Sun did not have any immediate comment.' Users of the future operating system will have to keep working with HFS+, a filesystem that is almost ten years old now." Update: 06/12 19:57 GMT by KD : An Apple spokesman contacted InformationWeek with a correction, which they ran as a comment on their original story: What Apple meant to say was, "ZFS would be available as a limited option, but not as the default file system."
Apple has beaten the world's most popular desktop operating system and the world's most popular Unixalike to the punch with multi-platform support. At Monday's WWDC07 Apple, Inc. CEO Steve Jobs revealed that, when Leopard ships, it will install and run on every one of its supported architectures from one DVD without bothering the user. And the more featured your system is, the more features Leopard will automatically enable.
For example, a user can use the same DVD to install Mac OS X on a dual 533 MHz Power Mac G4, a 32-bit Core Solo Mac mini, a 64-bit Power Mac G5 Quad, and a 64-bit Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. It even goes so far as to allow 64-bit apps without a 32-bit binary to run in 32-bit mode transparently, which is unprecedented thus far.
Windows, on the other hand, requires a different 32- or 64-bit version for each of its six flavors. So once you decide you want, say, Windows Professional Enterprise, you need to make sure it comes with 64-bit support. Otherwise, you'll be stuck booting your chip in 32-bit mode. Apps must be written and released for 32- or 64-bit and can't run otherwise. This limits users of older systems with Pentium III processors, for example, from running a 64-bit version of a popular game.
Linux eats dust in the race for 64-bit desktopedness too. With Ubuntu 7.05, the latest stable release, things have gotten simpler but still don't stack up to Leopard. So while you can download one version of Ubuntu for both 32- and 64-bit x86, if you want to run 32-bit programs on a 64-bit system you have to download a compatibility layer, check library dependencies, and compile it yourself. 64-bit programs won't work on a 32-bit arch, simply returning an error code and quitting.
That only counts for Intel and AMD, however. Other architectures supported by Linux, which number in the dozens and include 68k, ARM, Power, and SPARC among others, are one-at-a-time installs only and don't have any compatibility between 32- and 64-bit versions. So a user wanting to install on a 32-bit SPARC system from Sun will have to go out and purchase another completely different disc for installation on a 64-bit UltraSPARC system even tho both processors use the same instruction set.
At most, when counting Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server as two different "versions" of the operating system, you still have only to choose one and are then done with it. Each installs on all four architectures seamlessly and silently.
Windows comes to a total of twelves versions: 32- and 64-bit for each six editions. The number jumps to twenty-four when you consider that you must also choose whether to buy the retail or upgrade versions. This is simply too much work for most people whether they're doing personal use or IT.
Linux does little better, as above with the old download/compile scheme for legacy support. The kicker is that most other distributions of Linux don't even do that well. A user with Fedora Core 7 will still need to hunt down a different ISO for each and every nuance of processor, a real shame since Linux developers sit and scratch their heads over why Linux is still not ready for the desktop.
Come October, Mac OS X will serve everyone with one price, one version, one install: one vision of simple 64-bit desktop goodness.
"Upon further questioning, Croll would only confirm that Apple had never said ZFS would be a part of Leopard."
Obviously they haven't said anything about ZFS being included, but that doesn't imply they aren't including it. Sun might just have said something they weren't supposed to, or ZFS might just have been considered for inclusion. Who knows...
- These characters were randomly selected.
ZFS is in the WWDC Leopard build. It's currently configured for read-only, although full functionality is in there. Write ability is disabled for stability/integrity issues. /System/Library/Extensions:
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Jun 4 20:48 zfs.readonly.kext
What he declined to comment on was the comment made by the Sun executive, but he did comment on ZFS itself.
"Sufferin' succotash."
On the one hand, MS was telling everyone for years about their new filesystem named WinFS. Actually if you consider the capabilities of WinFS and not just the name, MS promised that type of technology in Cairo over 10 years ago. On the other, Apple never said it was experimenting with ZFS much less that it was going to use it. A Sun exec said Apple would use it in Leopard based on the fact that Apple entered into an agreement to use ZFS. My viewpoint is that although Apple got rights to use it, that doesn't mean that they were going to base Leopard on it. I'm sure they experiment with all sorts of software including filesystems. Maybe in the future, Apple might replace HFS+ with ZFS but not right now.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It was in the Leapord beta. I think that's a fairly good reason to make that assumption.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
First off, screen sharing appears to still be supported in the OS:
Image here
Additionally, the button for screen sharing is still present in the ichat screenshots:
Image here
(bottom right in the buddy list window)
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
...and HFS+ is just an incremental update from HFS - adding stuff like journaling and support for larger drives, long unicode file names, and some unixisms like inodes and /dev and hard links and case sensitivity.
So you can really say that HFS+ is almost 22 years old now.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Its description has been moved to the "Finder" page at http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/finde r.html in the "Closer connections" paragraph.
"By clicking on a connected Mac, you can see and control that computer (if authorized, of course) as if you were sitting in front of it. "
It's now integrated into the Finder (Closer Connections on the Finder page).
e r.html
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/find
Have you actually *used* ZFS? It is not CPU intensive in the least. I've run it on a 700MHz PIII with no problems. From the developer's mouth: "Assume 1 2GHz Opteron for every 200 MB/s, including ZFS *and* the NFS stack". 200 MB/s is an order of magnitude (10x) faster than any hard disk installed in a desktop or laptop. And, that's for a continuous I/O load, which most users never see.
If you're having CPU issues with ZFS, you're in the HD video business, in which case you'll have a dual CPU machine anyway.
If you disable the data checksumming, you have removed one of the main advantages of ZFS. You also can't (yet, anyway) disable metadata checksumming. (Not all of the advantages, of course -- the volume management is very well done, and it's got more space available than HFS+ does. But most home users don't run into those limits.)
People doing video editing on the Mac tend to suck up every single bit of bandwidth available; Apple has done a lot of work to give them that. And they continue to want more bandwidth. HFS+ lets you do pre-allocation of files, and direct-to-disk I/O. ZFS doesn't.
Of course, most home users won't run into that, either. So it's largely a wash. Except for the data integrity, which you're suggesting be turned off, and the volume management.
The InformationWeek editor has posted this ...
As to the news, it seems that Croll mispoke a couple of times when asked about ZFS in Leopard. Despite direct questions about Sun CEO Schwartz's claims that ZFS is there, Croll flatly denied the reports to two of our reporters in a 1:1 interview.
An Apple spokesperson called us Tuesday seeking to clarify Croll's statement. Croll was apparently supposed to indicate that ZFS would be available as a limited option, but not as the default file system."
We are now writing a separate story to note Apple's mis-statement and hopefully to reveal more about how ZFS would work in Leopard.
We'll update you here when that story is live.
Michael Singer
InformationWeek - West Coast Editor
Do a quick Google search for their relative market shares. Apple has 4-7% of the US market sales. ATI has 22-26% of US market sales. If you want to look at global market sales, Apple drops to 3% and ATI drops to 8%, since globally the high end market makes up a much smaller chunk of that market then it does in the US, with on the board solutions predominating.
Now before you waste my time with redefining the market definition to exclude on the board solutions, remember that is the percentage computers we're discussing since that provides the relative size of Apple as a customer. Getting the 5th largest computer maker in the US to sign on to include your product and not to include your competitors (as most large manufacturers do) would be big win for any of the players. Losing it through a move that does not even make any money is sheer idiocy.
If, at some point in the future Apple does do business with ATI again, do you think ATI will take keeping things confidential seriously or do you think they'll stupidly lose a giant contract while gaining nothing again?
If? The issue with Jobs dropping ATI occurred in 2000. Apple has been dealing with ATI for several years now (though since the AMD/ATI merger, Apple seems to be using NVidia GPUs in new products).