ZFS open source project abruptly shuts down, Snow Leopard weeps icy tears

The on-again / off-again love affair between Apple and ZFS seems to be all but over, with a brief but potent message on the Mac OS Forge project site stating the following: "The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly." If you'll recall, the implementation of the ZFS file system within Snow Leopard server was so close to happening that Apple actually published it as a feature of the forthcoming OS back in June of 2008. Now, however, all hope has presumably been lost. We'd bother explaining the rumors behind why all of this has suddenly crumbled, but honestly, will knowing the reasons really help the pain? No, no it won't.

[Via TUAW]

[michaspi Posted Oct 24th 2009 2:56PM]

Told.

[UnixSystemsEngineer Posted Oct 24th 2009 2:58PM]

I don't know where you're getting iChat on iPhone from, but I never heard anyone but rumor sites talk about it. I believe the battery life on the new laptops has been verified by plenty of independent sites -- even those who don't get 7 hours show that Apple returns a closer % of advertised battery life versus the competition.

Also, you don't know what ZFS is. Or WinFS, to steal an above comment.

[Joanna D Posted Oct 24th 2009 3:02PM]

I'm voting you down for being a Smarty Pants.

[zwaldowski Posted Oct 24th 2009 5:19PM]

I get 7-hour days from it all the time.

[UnixSystemsEngineer Posted Oct 24th 2009 2:56PM]

Of course the troll has no clue what ZFS is.

[sinai Posted Oct 24th 2009 3:33PM]

to the contrary. you totally know what zfs is

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 24th 2009 2:59PM]

The open source ZFS project has been inactive for about a year if you look at source commits. Clearly some work has been going on for snow leopard that has not been reflected in the open source project. Therefore, the discontinuation can mean many things: Discontinuation of ZFS at Apple, or that Apple continues to develop ZFS for OS-X but that they will or can not maintain it as open source - and this could be related to licensing issues. It could mean that apple continues to play with it some more, but does not consider their implementation ready and they do not want to expose their activity or inactivity in public while there are ongoing legal negotiations. Or it could mean that they do not want to expose their ZFS playground because they are not sure they will ever (or near term) use it for technical reasons (they might have pulled it from snow leopard because of too many bugs), and dropping open source will lower expectations

[UnixSystemsEngineer Posted Oct 24th 2009 3:00PM]

For those who are actually interested, there's a really interesting discussion on the matter over at Slashdot. I'm playing with ZFS on some Solaris boxes, but I'm mostly using it for flexibility in creating sub-volumes. I'm not doing anything with the cooler features like disk pooling yet, since we mostly do hardware RAID.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 24th 2009 3:29PM]

My contact with ZFS has been through the freenas project, an alternative to Drobo drives.


Hopefully ZFS isn't dead, but if Apple is abandoning it, that is not a great sign.

[thehawks Posted Oct 24th 2009 4:12PM]

I bet most Apple fanboy probably don't know what ZFS is for and if they do know about it is.

I bet most don't know how to install it and no there is no GUI to help you with that haha.

Yes Apple Killed ZFS Project but that does not mean its Over as long SUN keeps developing ZFS its here to stay.

[sirexilon Posted Oct 24th 2009 5:50PM]

HAHAHAHAHA... sure Apple and Open Source..

Please come on.... and somebody expected something like this going though all the way? hahahahaha

APPLE SUCKS... but yeah sure is pretty and EXPENSIVE and you cand do the same with less money in other platforms.

[derviskemal Posted Oct 24th 2009 4:22PM]

HAHAHAHAHA!

[MickeyMoo Posted Oct 24th 2009 4:58PM]

ReiserFS needs to get renamed - still kinda murder-y

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 24th 2009 5:07PM]

Maybe this is the first step of apple buying the Rights to the tech and making them the sole controller of it's direction.

[cobalthex Posted Oct 24th 2009 6:00PM]

whatevs.. they can pick it up if they really want to use it

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 24th 2009 9:16PM]

ZFS is probably a little ahead of its time just like most of Sun's other products but Apple has good reason to not support it anymore due to compatibility restrictions and also implementation problems. While it would have been a major step up in terms of a file system, it's a step down in terms of ease of use and ease of implementation which Apple has always concentrated on. Maybe in time, they'll reconsider or go towards an even better FS.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 25th 2009 1:36AM]

Snow Leopard. Apple's M.E.

[tongueincheek Posted Oct 25th 2009 7:56AM]

Apple sux oranges. Just wait for Microsoft to implement ZFT properly. At least Microsoft is working for our benefit and not just for CASH.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 25th 2009 8:49AM]

zfs has many high-end features that mostly benefit server users.
It has however also a whole bunch of features that would benefit the average user:

a) on disk parity, which allows detection and correction of bit errors
b) compression and encryption => more efficient use of space and better data security
c) snapshots, which would make TimeMachine about an order of magnitude faster and would have made other features possible, such as creating undo snapshots while a laptop is unable to connect to the TimeMachine drive, and backing up the hourly snapshots when the laptop is reconnected to the backup drive

There are plenty more features.
Check out these if you're actually want to be informed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems

[akatsuki Posted Oct 25th 2009 8:39PM]

Since it was the potential lawsuits and licensing issues that killed ZFS on the mac, I can only hope that they get Oracle to provide them with BTRFS. It would at least unify two of three OSes, it has all the modern features needed, going it alone for a filesystem is a ton of work and testing to get production ready, and it is much further along than anything Apple will come up with.

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[Nicnac Posted Oct 26th 2009 3:58PM]

wait what? Apple Fanboys were excited about ZFS, and we are now slamming WinFS?

Somebody has been reading his own doodles too much...