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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."
Nobody scoops Steve Jobs...
Too bad NTFS is almost 15, and I heard FAT stopped counting (because of a technical limitation).
"Users of the future operating system will have to keep working with HFS+, a filesystem that is almost ten years old now."
Yes, because a file system is something that should definitely be re-designed every two years or so. You know, just to stay "current"...
Why do reporters insist on interviewing marketing goons to uncover tech specs? This guy probably thought the reporter was asking if Leopard was going to include Zurich Financial Services.
I'm not saying this is retailatory... But this wouldn't be the first time Apple has gone out of it's way to punish partners for making preemptive announcements about Apples products. One may recall not too many years ago ATI making a show about Apple using their video cards just before another WWDC (maybe it was Macworld, I forget). Apple proceeded to spend the night pulling ATI's cards from their ready to ship Macs. In keynote the following morning Steve Jobs announced (surely with ATI execs in the front row) that nVidia was their premier partner for Mac video. It has been said that it was 6 monts before ATI execs could get even an executive secretary on the phone.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
The TFA says:
"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."
That reads like "would neither confirm nor deny to our reporter" to me, not "has denied".
Cheers,
Ian
"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.
It is really better for servers than a Workstation. It uses a lot of CPU power and adds features that no Workstation is likely to need for a while. It would be ideal for a NAS so maybe we will see it as an option on storage product from Apple.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
Almost as unprecedented as a Mac zealot making hilariously inaccurate technical claims because they simply don't understand what they're talking about, but don't see that a justification for keeping their mouths shut.
Come October, Mac OS X will serve everyone with one price, one version, one install: one vision of simple 64-bit desktop goodness.
I made a deal with a hitman. If I ever fall in love with a company to that extent he's going to come round and shoot me in the face. I find it a more palatable option than allowing myself to become a PR spewing corporate cocksucker.
FAT stopped counting after a stroke. FAT can still write down a number, but can no longer verbalize them.
Old file systems also have other problem. They are always repeating themselves and losing things, they get cranky all the time, and telling stories that go nowhere instead of simply reading and writing. And they start to get this weird smell.
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
Sun is shipping it for use in "enterprise" setups.
Their core business is very expensive hardware and software for demanding users: banks and the likes.
If you've gotta give the benefit of the doubt to someone in this area, it's gotta be Sun.
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.
You'd think so. You'd be wrong. Ever seen an "invalid sibling link"? I did, oh, in 1996, with the original HFS. Also this past year on a Tiger server. I suspect there was something wrong with the RAID controller, but a filesystem that relies on b-trees really should be able to at least try to repair them. HFS+ has good company, though. XFS from SGI (on Linux) has tons of stupid bugs, omissions, and corner cases; NTFS certainly has its share of "fun"; and I haven't used reiserfs enough to really know how stable it is. I do like JFS, though, even though it's not the fastest in the world.
...for Linux bite the bag, and at least NVidia's and Intel's are worth using, this is a blessing in disguise for all those who intend to use Linux with their MacIntels. No big loss.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
From the Leopard Sneak Peak, still in Google's cache here
However, there is no mention of iChat Desktop sharing on Apple's new iChat for Leopard page:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/icha
This sucks. I was really hoping to replace my kludgy VNC setups and NAT tables with a clean, elegant, and free remote desktop solution. Thanks a lot Apple!
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.
I was one of the two reporters in that interview and we both were surprised by Croll's comment. We were just contacted by Apple to say that what we heard (or what we both thought we heard) was not the fully story. The real story is:
An Apple spokesperson seeking to clarify Croll's statement indicated that ZFS would be available as a limited option, but not as the default file system."
Further detail:
It's only available as a read only option from the command line.
We're still trying to find out what this means, but a correction is coming.
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
My understanding is that Samsung did score the contract for the chip in the 2nd Gen Nano. Wikipedia says so, for whatever that's worth.
Additionally, I think people are getting crazy reactionary, assuming that the gaffe by SUN was responsible for ZFS not making Leopard.
There's no way to know if it was even in there before anyway.
And besides, Leopard was delayed by 6 months back in March. When you delay a product, you don't go adding new features to it, it'll just make the schedule longer. You might in fact defer features you were thinking of adding, like ZFS. It reduces the work to be done and helps shorten the schedule, keeping you closer to the original date.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I hope Sun are paying you well Toby.
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
That, in my mind, would be a compelling reason not to ever buy an Apple. If the company is so ready to remove features that would be useful to users and advance the state of the art just to get back at someone for leaking word of that feature, they clearly don't have the customer's best interests at heart.
What's more likely is that there were technical troubles getting it to work with the rest of the OS that couldn't be fixed or worked around before the release date. As others have noted, the support for ZFS is there (read-only at the moment), but even Sun has had some issues with it in the current version of Solaris. I don't doubt that Schwartz jumped the gun on the announcement, but I think he's got egg on his face for different reasons than you do.
This poo is cold.
The larger pattern of which this is one example seems to indicate that many people don't read, except Slashdot and other geek discussion forums, blogs, etc., In turn, this leads to a self-perpetuating defect. A meme, if you will, mutates, and replicates in this pool because the corrective mechanisms are weak. It then may rise to dominance in a limited domain of Slashdot, for example, if people don't spend enough time reading outside materials. (We already know the articles are often not read.) People see these things misspelled more often than not. If they don't read sources from literature or properly edited magazines or newspapers then they pick up the wrong spelling or usage, and add to the noise. The feedback loop builds as other people are then more likely to encounter the incorrect usages or spellings more frequently than they otherwise would.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I actually hoped that Leopard would have case sensitivity by default. Case insensitivity, files like "makefile" and "Makefile" are considered the same is a pain, when using OS X together with other OS. I lost many files due to case insensitivity (i.e. back up a directory on OSX, then move things back). While it is possible to enable case sensitivity, there are still too many things which break when doing the switch on the boot drive and this is no surprise because many applications depend on insensitive FS. What about allowing the user to have certain folders to be case sensitive?
I don't expect that ZFS would be a major announcement from Apple. It's too techie. The keynotes tend to focus on whiz-bang interface features. ZFS might have been the driving file system behind Time Machine, but when the announcement came, it would be all about Time Machine, not ZFS.
The five year history of Apple's share price indicates that Apple's strictly enforced policies regarding secrecy of their product plans is probably not hurting the company in any way. Considering the lackluster performance of other companies that blabber on and on and on about their half-baked plans that never mature, one might well conclude that this policy is helping Apple shareholders, even if it comes at the expense of occasional inconvenience.
That said, ZFS is probably not important enough for Apple to punish Sun over a set of flapping gums. If you want a better conspiracy theory, perhaps Apple was testing Sun to see if they could keep a secret. The answer is "No."
Really, though, everybody knows ZFS is interesting, and Apple is porting it to Mac OS X. It's quite likely that nobody at Apple knows when or if ZFS on Mac OS X will be mature enough to become a candidate for replacing the default filesystem. It probably won't happen before October, but that's not to say it will never happen.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
On the one hand, MS was telling everyone for years about their new filesystem named WinFS.
No, they weren't. WinFS is not - and never has been - a filesystem.
Considering there will only be read-only support of ZFS now I doubt it was as much as Steve Jobs beeing upset on Schwartz as it was Apple not beeing done with porting and getting ZFS to run which was the problem.