Hopefully this is the last time we'll be forced to post on this topic, but we're not holding our breath: now InformationWeek -- which quoted an Apple executive this morning
stating the polar opposite -- is reporting that Sun's ZFS file system IS in fact included in Leopard, albeit with a number of huge caveats. According to a company spokesperson seeking to clear up Brian Croll's "misstatement," while HFS+ continues to be the primary system used in OS X, ZFS has been coded in as a latent, "read-only option available from the command line." An IW reader claims to have accessed the system through Disk Utility's Erase menu, and states that "ZFS is only available on non-boot drives on Sun systems, so this is also the case for Leopard" -- seemingly reinforcing Croll's later assertion that Apple is really only "exploring it as a file system option for high-end storage systems with really large storage." So there you have it: Sun's Jonathan Schwartz
wasn't pulling our leg after all, even if ZFS fanboys won't be pleased with the (presumably) final word on this.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Robert @ Jun 13th 2007 1:42AM
Hooray much?
By the sound of it, there won't be too much of an appicable use of ZFS...
Go HFS+!
John Akin @ Jun 13th 2007 1:50AM
It uses it, but it doesn't inhale.
Smiler @ Jun 13th 2007 2:12AM
Perhaps it's being explored as an option of Leopard Server?
ct @ Jun 13th 2007 3:50AM
Man that guy has got to lose the ponytail.. I just can't even think of Sun or see their logo without thinking of the horror of that gross-out. Just cut it, dude, and take your place in normalcy.
neondiet @ Jun 13th 2007 4:05AM
I'm astonished that anyone seriously considered ZFS could be a contender for Leopards default (system disk) filesystem. New, untried, untested filesystems are always buggy at the start. And by their nature sometimes those bugs can be very nasty because it's your data they affect. Apple would have been stark raving bonkers to have attempted to use ZFS as the default f/s today; no matter how stable it appears in the lab. They're doing the right thing. They will take their time; let people use it as a technology preview, then enable it as a fully functional data-only filesystem. In my experience I would expect ZFS to be mature enough of OS X (tested, debugged, patched) and ready as a default boot filesystem about two years from now, at the earliest.
OS vendors only use boot filesystems that they KNOW are robust and bullet proof, because just one system crash resulting in sys disk corruption is one too many.
peshue @ Jun 13th 2007 6:49AM
I was surprised that anyone thought that ZFS would actually be the filesystem used because it isn't freaking bootable.
zipcube @ Jun 13th 2007 6:27PM
zfs has been bootable in OpenSolaris for months now actually. and it was rolled into last November's Solaris 10 update 4. As for stability, its already in use in heavily taxed storage servers supporting thousands of users accessing hundreds of TB of data.
Jon @ Jun 13th 2007 8:47AM
Wow. You are probably the first Macbot I have seen who would have a dig at other PC users, in a thread that has nothing to do with Microsoft, by sinking so low. Bravo.
Dale @ Jun 13th 2007 10:32AM
I'm sure the three people this seriously affects are happy.
Garry @ Jun 13th 2007 10:51AM
Wow. Irrelevant AND incoherent. Nice job, idiot.
Louis Wheeler @ Jun 13th 2007 1:45PM
This is the start of something big-- just wait a year or two.
The way that Intel is putting Virtualization (vPRO) into its hardware Apple is likely to put the OS into its own partition using HFS+ and putting all the user files using ZFS and Windows under NTFS into separate partitions. This is much better security. The Mac OS is rather immune to a virus taking over the system at Root privileges, but the Crackers keep trying. So, compartmentalizing the OS makes sense.
And ZFS will not simply be for high-end storage systems with really large storage. I remember when we had disk drives measured in Megabytes, now Gigabytes and eventually Terabytes. Its nice to have a file system that can handle Zettabytes.
Rich @ Jun 14th 2007 12:41AM
ZFS is bootable on Solaris 11 build 62 and above, so the statement about ZFS not being a boot drive on Solaris isn't entirely accurate.