A posting last week on the ZFS discussion list revealed that Apple has an interest in porting Sunis ZFS file system to Mac OS X, according to a Monday news report at MacNN. Sun employee Eric Kustarz said that Apple employee Chris Emura contacted him to express interest in the project.
"Speaking for the zfs team (at Sun)," Mr. Kustarz wrote, "this is great news and we fully support the effort. My PowerBook hungers for ZFS." His sentiments were echoed by others on the message thread.
ZFS is a modern file system created by Sun for its Solaris 10 operating system. The company touts its fast performance and support for almost unlimited capacity among its virtues. Sun also has a patent pending on ZFSi "adaptive endian-ness" technology, which enables users to move disks back and forth between SPARC and x86-based systems without worrying about processor incompatibilities. Apple is in the process of transitioning its entire computer line to x86 processors produced by Intel.
The Mac Observer has contacted Mr. Kustarz and Mr. Emura for further comments on this news and will update this article with their replies.