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Apple Discontinues ZFS Project
Zaurus writes "Apple has replaced its ZFS project page with a notice that 'The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.' Apple originally touted ZFS as a feature that would be available in Snow Leopard Server. A few months before release, all mention of ZFS was removed from the Apple web site and literature, and ZFS was notably absent from Snow Leopard Server at launch. Despite repeated attempts to get clarification about their plans from ZFS, Apple has not made any official statement regarding the matter. A zfs-macos Google group has been set up for members of Apple's zfs-discuss mailing list to migrate to, as many people had started using the unfinished ZFS port already. The call is out for developers who can continue the forked project."
Daring Fireball suggests that Apple's decision could have been motivated by NetApp's patent lawsuit over ZFS.
Now if you're using zfs on Mac OS, you can't complain if it loses your data. You already knew it was forked.
God forbid the summary tell us what ZFS is
Posting anon, lest someone guess who my sources are.
The long and short of it was, Apple and Sun couldn't come to terms on the licensing. Sun wanted a lot of money for giving it to Apple under different terms and the amount they wanted was in the range of "hell, we could do it ourselves for that".
Add to that, the Oracle buyout and Sun going into management paralysis, and Apple decided to go it alone.
Apple's CoreOS team includes several of the lead engineers from the ZFS project (who fled the remnants of Sun in the Schwartz melt-down), and the architect of the BeFS. I'm expecting Apple to do their own next-generation file system, probably in the 10.7 timeframe.
I doubt that it's a legal issue as the primary reason that this has happened, especially considering that the project seems to have stagnated steadily in successive versions of OS X. There just doesn't seem to have been the will within the OS X development group to make this work and to support and fully integrate ZFS into the inner workings of the OS. Given the pretty extensive functionality and plumbing of ZFS its probably been too much of a big ask to integrate a filesystem like that into a desktop. They might well have come to the conclusion that ZFS was simply complete overkill on a desktop and that it just wasn't possible.
However, they still desperately need a next generation filesystem and according to the linked article they're hiring filesystem engineers. I don't see any evidence that this was anything other than a technical avenue that they've explored that has fallen by the wayside as so many have before.
Dustn Sallings put the code on Github and has already hacked some basic Snow Leopard support and a minimal installer:
http://dustin.github.com/2009/10/23/mac-zfs.html
Code's here, fork away:
http://github.com/dustin/mac-zfs
Upgrade to an SSD, and it hardly matters what crusty old filesystem you're using. You're still going to have far greater speed and no mechanical failures. As far as I can see, the only vaguely useful ZFS feature is snapshots... it doesn't even do encryption. I don't think this is a major loss.
THIS is an example of what deserves to get a "+1, Funny" mod, not the ten thousandth retelling of an "in Soviet Russia" joke or some other tired meme.
Of course, there's also no better way to prove his point than to get offended by it.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Interesting - we're chugging happily along in Linux / Windows / Mac / Unix land having a load of competing filesystems where all the popular ones have *roughly* similar capabilities. Then ZFS appears in OpenSolaris and filesystem design becomes cool again. Everyone starts either porting ZFS or making filesystems with similar features ... Now a major player that actually *had* ported ZFS (somewhat) is seemingly deciding to go it alone. It seems as though the next-gen filesystem space is also going to have a variety of competing filesystems.
I generally think this is a good thing, lets just hope that a reasonable degree of interoperability becomes possible anyway.
...who don't even *have* a next-generation filesystem project to cancel.
(see - I can troll, too!)
Hearing that ZFS support was upcoming in Snowleopard is one of the things that encouraged me to switch my desktop from Windows XP to MacOS.
It is an understatement to say i'm disappointed to see Apple abandoning this.
Support for ZFS is not just a little feature checkbox, it's a major component of the OS.
It'd be like if Microsoft dropped/cancelled support for Solitaire from Windows....
No shit. I can't wait to switch to Windows 7 with the totally awesome WinFS.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Leaving aside all the crazy storage pool stuff (great for servers, not necessarily that useful for desktops), there are some interesting features in ZFS that I hope make their way into Mac OS X in some filesystem.
Snapshots and Copy-On-Write filesystem clones seem like a great way to improve the Time Machine backup feature, and would make it easy for applications to provide backup-on-save very efficiently.
The compression and encryption features would likely be useful for some people. I don't think the increased filesystem limits (number of files, size of files) would matter for most folks.
...played too much Planescape?
When I see Github I think two things:
- Githyanki
- Github for Lesbians! (Thanks, xkcd)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAMMER
Should be under a suitable license for their usage. It's written for DragonflyBSD which has a funny filesystem driver interface but AIUI the developer had ports to other OSes in mind, so it should still be doable. It can do cheap filesystem snapshots so it would support Time Machine-style operation well. The question is whether it could be adapted to fit Apple's uses well enough. Given one of the linked articles suggests Apple are hiring FS developers my guess would be that they've decided they'd rather build a ground-up filesystem that supports all the (slightly odd set of) features MacOS X wants.
Luckily, networking and filesharing systems are robust enough to make interoperability a minor concern these days. It's not like we're exchanging zfs floppies.
Yes, I realize it contains the letters "FS", but ZFS is not just a filesystem. It incorporates a lot more than that. That's one of the reasons it's really hard to integrate into an OS, given the architecture of most OS's.
A lot of confusion has resulted from labelling ZFS a "filesystem". It actually combines both volume management and filesystem layers to achieve unique levels of performance, manageability, and data protection. Merits close study, as the concepts of ZFS overtake current best practices, conventional filesystems and RAID. You can get this taste of the future today, if you're using Solaris 10/OpenSolaris/FreeBSD.
you had me at #!
You make an excellent point: over distance the file-system is moot.
Unfortunately when you're moving a terabyte or so from room/building to another you'll find yourself holding something that has to use the lowest common denominator.
Worse still, it's Fucking Antiquated Trash.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
I suggest you drop MacOS like a hot potato, send a nastygram to Apple giving them a piece of your mind, and check out both OpenSolaris and FreeBSD. They both support ZFS, OpenSolaris because Sun invented ZFS, and FreeBSD because they have competent management AND engineering. Unlike certain others (and I'm not pointing the finger at linux).
Once again, FreeBSD has shown the fools in Cupertino how it's done.
Too bad for Apple, not for ZFS. OpenSolaris and FreeBSD support ZFS just fine. I do think it's best suited to servers, and OpenSolaris and FreeBSD are greatly superior server operating systems anyway.
You may want to check out SUNs ceo's comments on the netapp issues... This dates all the way back to 2007. From the comments above this appeared to be something new. http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/harvesting_from_a_troll
I predicted that they were working on a ZFS-alike on 2 Sept. NIH Syndrome does seem the most likely explanation. Which is disappointing. Cooperation on ZFS seemed a natural and powerful cross-endorsement for both Apple and Sun.
you had me at #!
Unless you want to dual boot and share /home; it's a royal pain in the ass between BSD / Linux / Solaris ; then your only real option is ext2. Add windows and it becomes very hard; you're pretty much down to using NTFS or fat32 and then doing hackery with the mount options and even THEN it only really works if you have one partition for each user who's going to have a $HOME shared between OSes. (And this is the only reason why I ONLY boot linux)
Upgrade to an SSD, and it hardly matters what crusty old filesystem you're using. You're still going to have far greater speed and no mechanical failures. As far as I can see, the only vaguely useful ZFS feature is snapshots... it doesn't even do encryption. I don't think this is a major loss.
And how do you know the data you read off your disk is the same data you wrote to it? ZFS is the only production-ready file system that uses checksums to make sure your data is consistent and there hasn't been bit rot (and can fix bit rot if you have redundancy).
ZFS is also able to shim in SSDs so that you can get the cheap capacity of SATAs, but the speed and latency of SSDs at the fraction of the price:
http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/hybrid_storage_pool_top_speeds
Snapshots are awesome, especially when you can replicate them to a remote system over SSH:
http://www.markround.com/archives/38-ZFS-Replication.html
It's linear time finding changed blocks, and not like rsync where you have to stat() every single file on a file system. You can actually snapshot every five seconds, and do near real-time replication over an oceanic link (which one of the ZFS developers did between China and California).
According to a recent talk by the head people of ZFS (Bonwick and Moore), crypto and de-dupe are expected to be committed by the end of this year. The crypto code has public patches available for code review.
Trust me, it's a big loss. I'm sure the smart people at Apple will think of something good, but ZFS has had a lot of pounding on it for many years (e.g., CERN with a lot of their LHC testing), and starting from scratch means another fucking wheel being created.
Re: That's true for any licensee - in fact, Net App could adopt ZFS today and receive the same protection. The port is done to FreeBSD, the OS on which Net App's filers are built.
Last I checked NetApp was using some NetBSD-derived components in their Filer OS. I haven't heard that it's "based on FreeBSD".
Is he mixing up NetApp with Apple?
Hopefully, whatever Apple develops next will. It would really suck if the only persistent way to refer to a file was its path.
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
At this point in life, HFS is working fine, and the drobo is quietly humming away. I'm glad snow leopard was relatively painless to upgrade too, and not sure this would have been the case if ZFS had been included in 10.6.
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
We are, however, going to exchange SDXC cards. And those come with a next-gen filesystem. With extremely limited interoperability (read: none). If we had something better than FAT32 that actually worked on all OSes we could just ignore the specification and use that, even if it's something as overblown (for flash cards) as ZFS.
It seems that FAT32 is still the apex of filesystem interoperability, closely followed by NTFS, courtesy of reverse-engineered drivers. That's kind of sad.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Really? Do you know what "yob" means? Yob, a rude, noisy, and aggressive young man.
So there is a great opportunity here.
Someone needs to take an open source filesystem and develop it into a seamlessly cross-platform filesystem. Release drivers for all popular filesystems. Maybe start with ext2, maybe with something better. Release a simple install for Windows, Mac, and Linux so we can all share it easily. Release proof of concepts drivers for RockBox so the MP3 player manufacturers will have an easy time porting it. etc. etc.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Does this have nothing to do with Sun ZFS? I hope I didn't miss something.
Kriston
None of this matters: Apple is dying. It's a matter of record.
This is very disappointing. Although ZFS wasn't a make-or-break deal for me as to whether or not I'd go fully Apple at home (and I have..all members of my family have their own Apple system), this was a feature that I was really looking forward to. It would have been very useful on mHowever, it is what it is. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple took some of the concepts from ZFS and improved on them to make it their own.
I'm sure Apple is planning something, OS X's file system is showing its age. Ars had a very good article about it here: From BFS to ZFS
After all these years, Sun knows how to cover themselves. ZFS engineers can't just cross the road to Apple and work on a directly comparable product.
Also, the "lead engineers" are still at Sun, if the ZFS list is anything to go by. In particular Jeff Bonwick.
you had me at #!
Ext2/Ext3 aren't supported by Macs. MSDOS doesn't support the extended attributes. HFS support on Linux sucks. The only one I've been able to find was UFS. It's not terrible, but it does seem to corrupt more often than I'd like.
Anybody know of any better options?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
You can see that it has missing functionality such as encryption support and it does not seem to be a good fit for systems with removable media. It is also counterintuitive for the average user to grasp the concept that drives are part of a "pool". Finally, it is prone to fragmentation.
Given all of the problems and lack of completeness, I cannot understand how anyone in their right mind would advocate using ZFS for any system at the time. I think that ZFS, should it continue to be developed, could be a useful FS for a SAN device but I don't see it as ever being a good fit for a desktop OS.
I have heard (from mailing list) that Finder on OS X, including SL (Cocoa) does some block level stuff while emptying trash and it was the reason that poster gave up ZFS without Apple support.
As I use Finder for years and know how strange things it does sometimes, it sounded valid to me. Perhaps you should empty your own trash via Terminal?
MS is happy with their NTFS, Apple and even professional users are happy with HFS+ especially after the addition of journaling. Only unhappy people are techies, a small percentage of them.
Of course, if you are Pixar, you got XSan etc. as option.
At this point in life, HFS is working fine, and the drobo is quietly humming away. I'm glad snow leopard was relatively painless to upgrade too, and not sure this would have been the case if ZFS had been included in 10.6.
I doubt that including support for ZFS would have caused a terrible pain. It isn't like it would implement the ZFS files system in an upgrade.
My two rabbits have been checking their filesystems all afternoon yesterday.
-- Cheers!
You are wrong about "several of the lead engineers from the ZFS project ...".
How do I know this?
A simple grep on the source code commit history, joined with the password database in NIS tells me this.
None of the lead engineers from the ZFS project have left Sun. Yes people who have made changes are no longer there, but those people are NOT the lead engineers of ZFS.
I therefore challenge you to provide any evidence to back up your claim.
So, if you have been untruthful about one aspect of your comment, then it is likely that other "facts" are incorrect as well.
Encryption support is in the works. This isn't a particularly needed and commonly used feature, though, is it? NTFS supports file-level encryption, but do HFS/etc. support it (maybe they do, just asking)?
Then don't use it for removable media. You can still use other filesystems!
The average user would not need to expose theirselves to the concept of a storage pool because they would very likely only be using one disk per pool. How is this any worse than having to configure a RAID array with a typical RAID controller or software RAID?
This is something I see referenced on Wikipedia (the sole source of your criticism apparently), but how much of an actual issue is this in the real world? And its not as if Apple's adoption of it would not have also led to an independent effort to create a defragger, if it was deemed nessecary.
Fragmentation, though, is only an occurrence in a very specific scenario. What is your beef?
So what do you recommend as an alternative? That's right, you don't have one. You just have an axe to grind never apparently having used it before and know nothing of it beyond Wikipedia.
What do you say to the many thousands of Solaris systems that run terabytes of ZFS storage with high reliability? Chances are that you are interacting with ZFS indirectly in your every day activities that involve computers.
The problem is reaching critical mass. The filesystem needs to be out with rock solid drivers for Linux and especially OS X and Windows within short time of the first affordable SDXC cards hiting market. (That would be within the next two or three months.) Right now, Apple offers no way of reading/writing standard SDXC cards (and yes, SDHC readers can access SDXC cards, just not at the new speeds; at least with a firmware update). That might change if they do decide to license exFAT.
If the replacement FS really gained traction we'd see all Mac and Linux users use it for their SDXC cards and recommend it to their Win-using friends. Then we'd just somehow need to convince the entire electronics industry that every device capable of working with SDXC cards needs to support three different file systems (FAT32, exFAT, whatever we use).
Remember, the manufacturers don't care about what works with Rockbox, they only care about what makes them money. All Linux users demanding something is irrelevant and all Mac users demanding something can only faze a few manufacturers that mostly cater to them. We'd need a significant part of all Windows users to decide they want to use some other file system over exFAT, which works with all devices and most computers.
In short, we'd need to implement a vastly superior alternative that works on every major operating system and is more appealing to the general public than (the actually pretty decent) exFAT and start a media blitz about it, all within three months.
From that perspective I expect that the whole thing will end with Windows and later OS X using exFAT and Linux users either paying for the commercial exFAT driver or not using SDXC at all.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
The compression and encryption features would likely be useful for some people. I don't think the increased filesystem limits (number of files, size of files) would matter for most folks.
So 640 KB^H^H TB should be enough for anyone?
Why does everyone think that there can only be one file system supported by the OS? Keep removable media as HFS+ (what the file system was designed for back in the 80s!) and keep your local storage as ZFS.
Looks like another great example of how software patents spur innovation and improve the lives of the general public!
I generally think this is a good thing, lets just hope that a reasonable degree of interoperability becomes possible anyway.
I agree. Having options is good, especially since there isn't a clear winner yet. Still, I'd like to have a filesystem that will be usable (ideally read/wire + boot) by all major operating systems.
I have never believed this to be an issue of licensing, but one of technical difficulty, having a fair amount of experience with ZFS, Solaris and MacOS I can say a few things with some conviction.
1. ZFS is very aggressive and can expect a lot of a system, look at its early effects on Oracle DB and NFS and you will see a lot has gone into its implementation in Solaris.
2. ZFS boot took a good amount of time to get working in a supported fashion on Solaris, it would be an assumption that boot would be one of the requirements/reasons to port this to MacOS, the snapshot/backup/upgrade possibilities would be to great to pass.
3. It would not be unfair to say that the Darwin kernel is not as mature as the Solaris kernel in regards to fine tuning, especially in the area of memory management, if you doubt this, take two comparable systems and load them up.
4. I've got an external drive that I was at one point sharing with both a Solaris host and a MacOS host, when I put the Mac under a heavy load and than let it get idle strange things would start to happen, I suspect but can't say for a fact that some of the aggressive caching mentioned in my first point ended up in a VM file, and I suspect that my third point would explain this, Solaris can/does limit the amount of ZFS memory cache dynamically so that this scenario will in most cases simply not occur.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Existence of the NetApp/Sun suit, while most likely a loss for NetApp, is IMHO enough to prevent Apple betting the farm on ZFS in the heart of OS X.
you had me at #!
Context: I've been a software engineer for 25+ years. Solaris is the best server O/S. MacOSX is the best desktop O/S. In my home I have Solaris server and multiple Macs.
The dropping of ZFS by Apple is disappointing.
It is yet one more symptom of the degrading state of Apple software. Over the last year I've seen noticeable and serious drop in quality. It's starting to look awful familiar to me (having lived it with various employers) - more and more "features", more and more "date-driven" releases, less and less quality. If they keep on this path they may eventually not be any better than Windows.
Apple, and Apple users, would be much better off if they stopped trying to develop and maintain an inferior operating system and spent their resources on applications and the user environment. A Solaris core with Mac user environment and applications would be the best of both worlds.
Of course this will never happen as egos and marketing BS will prevent it.
That doesn't make any sense. I fail to see why Apple should agree licensing terms for a CDDL licensed open source project or how Sun could demand money for the privilege. Sun were positively overflowing with love towards Apple (as they usually are) when they heard that anyone would actually be interested in their uber new filesystem.
Scuttlebutt on the web seems to be that Sun wanted Apple to stand on its own if it was sued over ZFS, and Apple wanted Sun to pay its costs if it was sued over ZFS.
ZFS and HFS+ have nearly-identical limits on everything except number of files. The maximum size of files and volumes with HFS+ is 2^63 bytes, rather than 2^64 bytes for ZFS. On the number of files per volume, there's a more-significant difference, 2^32 vs 2^48.
I can (just) imagine someone running into the number-of-files limit in a non-pathologic case, in a few decades or so. On a terabyte-sized drive, if you divide the whole thing up into 2^32 tiny files, each file would be 255 bytes long. Actually, they wouldn't, because the minimum allocation unit on HFS+ is 512 bytes, and you wouldn't hit the number-of-files limit at all.
The allocation units scale up in size from there, so on a 330 Terabyte drive (which'll be average in 10 years, if trends continue), each file would take up at least 90KB. I still don't see that as much of a disadvantage. I wonder what the average file size on my current drives is? Certainly a *lot* of the bulk of the files are digital photos and audio/video files, which are several megabytes in size. File sizes for media are likely going to increase over time, from higher resolution.
Mac OS X already boots from RAID and other nonstandard volumes by using an HFS+ helper partition that contains the booter, the kernel, and any drivers required for booting. The code to support that mode for nonstandard filesystems is probably already there, too; UFS worked that way because Open Firmware didn't understand UFS.
Why does everyone think that there can only be one file system supported by the OS? Keep removable media as HFS+ (what the file system was designed for back in the 80s!) and keep your local storage as ZFS.
Why do you think software development is so cheap that man hours can be thrown away just to add a feature that is unstable and almost nobody would ever use? Speaking as a software developer with over a decade of experience, I can tell you that good software does not arrive on the scene by having just a bunch of code monkeys slaving away without any analysis or plan in mind.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
FreeBSD is about to release 8.0, with ZFS, and ZFS has officially been labeled production-ready:
http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2009-04-2009-09.html#FreeBSD/ZFS
Myself, it works good for me on a storage server. There are some edge cases left, for example I could provoke a panic by combining ZFS on a 3-disk array with automatically parking the disks on timeout. Accessing the filesystem with power down disks didn't go so well. This was in 9-current, though.
ZFS is still the only thing out there providing all of:
- snapshots
- compression
- attributes such as compression can be turned on and off by directory tree
- a "filesystem-aware raid", aka something that avoids the RAID hole
- and as mentioned optional extra redundancy (more than one disk can die) and the checksumming. That means, for example, you can have your filesystem like raid-5 but some directories as redundant as raid-6
Until Linux gets BTRFS (and I'm not sure how complete it is with regards to all those features) it's the best thing for a storage server out there.
%%
Apple's diversion either means they do their own thing (ZFS seems excessively hard to integrate) or is based on patent concerns, or the former because of the latter.
But if you look at the core of it, NetApp tries to claim patents on everything that does filesystem-integrated snapshots (as opposed to the lame LVM raw device layer snapshots in Linux). Reimplementing a filesystem with snapshots, whether you call it ZFS or not, won't help here.
In a message to the zfs-discuss list, he says that "the essence of [the issue]" was that Apple and Sun couldn't come to mutually agreeable terms on a license.
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Poor sod, have you ever worked with multimillion $ ( or £ or € ) complex systems?
Even with a basic setup, the advantages for a real pro become obvious in no time.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Backups become immensely simpler with ZFS.
Any desktop user with tons of media files would appreciate that.
The GNOME file manager in Solaris is being integrated with ZFS features, so snapshots become a point and click task.
Backup your snapshots (incremental backups for all practical means) and you will be in business without needing to understand complex backup policies.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Y'all seem to be forgetting a couple very important points. First, ZFS is here. Now. In production. Officially supported. It had years and years of development and testing, and has been in Solaris 10 for years after that. It's solid and it's here and it works great. Btrfs, on the other hand, whether you think it's technically better or technically worse, is still *YEARS* away from any kind of stable release. It doesn't even have RAID 5 yet, fer chrissakes. Even if it were 100% feature complete today, it would still be *years* before I or anyone else would even dream of using it in production.
Say what you want about Sun, their engineering is top notch. They put ZFS through hell while testing it, and it's been out for some time now. Btrfs has just barely reach infancy.
Second, one of the things I consider *most* important about ZFS is that it's EASY TO USE. I always had a hell of a time trying to understand all the million complex concepts and commands in Veritas and other volume managers. After a lonmg time as a sysadmin I still have trouble with it. You know what? I learned ZFS in about twenty minutes. The way they're organized and written the commands makes it so dead easy to use it amazing. I can do with *one* ZFS command what would have taken an hour of head-scratching and manual-referencing with Veritas.
Btrfs, on the other hand, despite the assertion in the mission statement that usability is a main goal, shows every sign of becoming yet another filesystems where doing anything involves 15 different commands to do different things, each with 22 bizarre options. The scanty "man pages" that exist are nearly impossible to find (not on the btrfs web site) and when you do finally track down something like a command syntax or parameter reference, it appears that btrfs commands are going to be just as - if not more - incredibly complex and intimidating as Veritas.
If the btrfs project people want folks to adopt that filesystem rapidly and enthusiastically, they need to *completely* rewrite the interface, take a page from ZFS, make it one or two command with a simple, english-like syntax. hell, since ZFS is sort-of open sourced, they could probably steal the entire ZFS syntax verbatim - legally. The code itself may be under some kind of license, but I doubt anyone could get sued for using the same commands. They're just words, and I don't think something released under any kind of open source license could claim copyright violation over non-code text. If btrfs really wants to grow, thrive, and be accepted, they have to pay a LOT more attention to the usability issue. One of the huge reasons so many people like ZFS so much, including myself, is it's something that's extremely powerful on one hand but I can learn to use rapidly and become an expert on in no time. The syntx is so english-like it's almost like talking to another person.
Oh, BTW - just bite the bullet and call it 'BFS". "btrfs" is freaking awkward and stupid. It rolls off the tongue as easily as the abomination "GNU/Linux".
On most systems that support ZFS, there is already the capability to to encryption via the loop back interface. They are working on zfs native encryption and it has been under test internal in Sun for awhile. De-dup capabilities will be available soon. The development of zfs has been incredibly fast for a file system. Considering the Mac implementation is at rev 8 and I've got 14 on my OpenSolaris system should say something... Apple hasn't really put much effort into keeping up with the state-of-the-art of ZFS.
I've never had corruption issues on ZFS over the several years of heavy use, ups crashes, lightning strikes, etc. During the same time, I've seen several XFS, NTFS, and HFS+ filesystems in adjacent servers get twisted beyond repair.