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Apple: Leopard Will Include ZFS... Kind Of

Apple: Leopard Will Include ZFS... Kind Of

by , 7:50 AM EDT, June 13th, 2007

Apple's revolving door on ZFS has spun back around again. Now the word out of Cupertino is that the ZFS file system will be included in Mac OS X 10.5, but in a limited capacity, according to InformationWeek.

Several days before the Steve Jobs keynote at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz claimed that Mac OS X 10.5, or Leopard, would include his company's 128-bit ZFS file system. On keynote day, however, Mr. Jobs said nothing about ZFS.

Afterwards, Brian Croll, Apple's senior director of product marketing for Mac OS, commented "ZFS is not happening."

Later, an Apple spokesperson attempted to clarify Mr. Croll's comments to InformationWeek by stating that ZFS actually will be included in Leopard, but only as a read-only option from the command line.

And finally, Mr. Croll added his own clarification to the spokesperson's clarification. "ZFS is not the default file system for Leopard," he said. "We are exploring it as a file system option for high-end storage systems with really large storage. As a result, we have included ZFS - a read-only copy of ZFS - in Leopard."

It appears that, at least for now, Apple's HFS+ file system is here to stay. Macs will continue to use the familiar file system that has been a part of Apple's operating system for about ten years, but ZFS may be an option for some high-capacity storage systems.

In the end, it looks like both Mr. Schwartz's and Mr. Croll's original comments were right... at least a little bit. ZFS will be included in Mac OS X, but it "is not happening" in the sense that it won't be Leopard's default file system.

Observer Comments

Show: Subjects Only | Full Comments
Close Name:paikinho Posts: 2 Joined: 29 Aug 2006
Subject: Wiki - Can't format local drives and can't boot with it.

From the ZFS Wiki:

Apple, Inc. is porting ZFS to their Mac OS X operating system, according to a post by a Sun employee on the opensolaris.org zfs-discuss mailing list, and previewed screenshots of the next version of Apple's Mac OS X.[18] As of Mac OS X 10.5 (Developer Seed 9A321), support for ZFS has been included, but lacks the ability to act as a root partition, noted above. Also, attempts to format local drives using ZFS are unsuccessful; this is a known bug.[19] On June 6th 2007, Sun's CEO Jonathan I. Schwartz publicly announced, days before Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference, that Apple will be making ZFS "the" filesystem in OS 10.5 Leopard[20]. Marc Hamilton, VP for Solaris Marketing later wrote to clarify that, in his opinion, Apple is planning to use ZFS in future versions of Mac OS X, but not necessarily as the default filesystem for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. [21]

Close Name:Guest
Subject: Last week: hurray ZFS. This week: ZFS what?

Unless a file system is the default/boot filesystem it isn't even worth the effort in looking at it because there are just too many interaction problems with non-standard configurations. If you need ZFS then you need something that it is dead center on, i.e.: Solaris. So it looks like: bye bye ZFS on Mac OS X. Maybe in a few years...

Close Name:Guest
Subject:

I just downloaded the latest beta of apple leopard. There is a read-only port of ZFS available.

http://rajeev.name/blog/2007/07/13/zfs-in-leopard/

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