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Leopard May Be ZFS-free
by , 10:45 AM EDT, June 12th, 2007
A few days before Steve Jobs's World Wide Developer Conference keynote on Monday, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced that Apple would transition to his ZFS file system with Mac OS X 10.5. That announcement never came, and now Apple's senior director of product marketing for Mac OS, Brian Croll, is claiming that Leopard will stick with HFS+, according to InformationWeek.
"ZFS is not happening," he said.
One of the benefits of Sun's ZFS file system is that it can handle substantially larger file sizes than HFS+, which typically isn't an issue today, but could be a critical feature in several years.
Mr. Croll would not comment on Mr. Schwartz's statements, but did confirm that Apple has never claimed that ZFS would be included with Leopard.
Sun representatives were unavailable for comment.
Observer Comments
Quoteburrito wrote:
the new finder screams "ZFS" so it will surprise me if it's not in the final product.
I'm not familiar with ZFS; how ya figure that the new Finder "screams" it? Is it something like the transition from MFS to HFS, where adding the "H" (hierarchical) allowed folders within folders instead of having all folders at the root level?
Tue Jun 12, 2007 3:24 pm Subject: False Announcement for Free Publicity?
This is probably foolish conspiracy talking, but;
Barring the possibility that Apple isn't using ZFS solely to spite a vendor for leaking info, What if Mr. Schwartz was using the upcoming anticipation of WWDC to help hype ZFS amongst developers?
Crazy talk? Maybe. BUT STAY OUT OF MY TEETH!!!
Tue Jun 12, 2007 4:07 pm Subject: Re: Time Machine
QuoteAnonymous wrote:
I know next to nothing about ZFS, but it seems to me that Time Machine "screams" ZFS more than anything else I've seen. Is that not true?
It would make sense for Time Machine to take advantage of some of the features of ZFS. However, unless I'm mistaken Time Machine still works fine on HFS+. If that is true, it also means ZFS is not necessarily an integral part of what makes Time Machine work.
Another possibility is that Apple decided ZFS in Tiger isn't quite ready for prime time so they're going to save it for a future 10.5.x update, or even 10.6.
Tue Jun 12, 2007 5:14 pm Subject: It was never going to happen.
Head to http://www.macjournals.com/ and sign up for a free trial of MWJ, and you'll get 15 pages on exactly how ZFS works, including many, many reasons why it is not suitable for anyone's primary Macintosh file system this decade. It would require something like 20GB to 50GB *more* disk space just for a standard Mac OS X installation, it doesn't work the way most people say it does, and even the features it would provide also require enough background CPU time that they're not suitable for notebooks.
It's abundantly obvious that everyone pushing "ooh! ZFS! shiny!" either doesn't know how to read the file system's public specification, or didn't bother. (It's a fantastic file system for servers and arrays, but not for desktops or portables.) No one looked at this story with *any* skepticism, nor did anyone provide any reasons why HFS Plus supposedly needs to be "replaced."
Sun's marketing department deserves to win *lots* of awards for this.
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