“Back in May of this year it was rumoured that Apple’s File System Development Team had contacted Sun Microsystems to help in a translation of the Zettabyte File System to Mac OS X,” Alex Brooks reports for World of Apple.
“With the most recent Build of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, ZFS has appeared to have finally made an appearance, as per the rumours,” Brooks reports. “…Everything on ZFS is checksummed meaning zero data corruption.”
Overall ZFS offers the following key advantages:
• Pooled storage – No requirement for a volume manager when extra volumes added, the volume is simply added to a pool creating a vdev (virtual device), a collection of vdevs makes up a zpool, which in essence is the storage available to the file system.
• Snapshots – Read-only point in time of the file system
• Clones – write-able copy of a snapshot
• RAID-Z – Makes use of copy-on-write; rather than overwriting old data with new data, it writes new data to a new location and then overwrites the pointer to the old data
• Detects and then corrects data corruption
• Incredibly fast due to intelligent pre-fetching, and dynamic striping.
More in the full article, including a screenshot fo ZFS in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard’s Disk Utility application here.
“A French user has discovered that ZFS is now ‘officially’ supported in Leopard [French], while testing the latest build of Apple’s upcoming operating system. Indeed it is now possible to create disk images or partitions formated in ZFS (screen capture included). However, it seems that it is not possible yet to install the OS on a ZFS partition,” OS News reports.
Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris.org describes ZFS:
ZFS is a new kind of filesystem that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We’ve blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that’s actually a pleasure to use.
Much more information here.
Back in August, Ars Technica’s John Siracusa wrote, “For Mac geeks of a certain persuasion, the first mention of a soon-to-be-revealed feature of Leopard during the WWDC keynote set off a mental chain-reaction. That feature was Time Machine, and the name alone was enough to cause one particular phrase to hammer in the mind of many people, including me: ‘New file system in Leopard!’ …Maybe Apple is moving to ZFS in Leopard!”
MacDailyNews Take: If true, this is quite a big deal and qualifies as a major Leopard feature.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “LinuxGuy and Mac Prodigal Son” for the heads up.]
[UPDATE: December 17, 9:18am EST: Added World of Apple quotes and link.]
Related article:
Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard to feature new file system? – August 16, 2006
As of Mac OS X 10.5 (Developer Seed 9a321), support for ZFS has been included, however currently lacks the ability to be installed on a ZFS Partition.(From Wiki)
That was quick. And I’m with gorsh, Wiki didn’t help me understand this better at all- but it does sound Insanely Great!™
Ziffs, Zaffs or Zuffs – that is the question.
ZFS = Zettabyte File System = ZeFS, naturally.
Well this doesn’t bode well for a January release of Leopard. There’s no way would they include a new FS this close to launch 🙁
Oh, thank Gawd for the above explanations!
For a second I thought ZFS meant “Zunes For Sure.”
Leopard seems to be quite an upgrade if this is true. In true Apple fashion, they seem to be laying the groundwork for bigger and bigger things in their future plans. Awesome time to be a mac owner.
As JonnyB pointed out ZFS cannot be used for boot volumes yet. So Apple is simply adding support to use and make such volumes. Maybe booting from ZFS will be initiated in 10.6 but there is no way Apple can do that for 10.5. Too risky – this would need a lot of validation before going to market.
“MW-good, as in English is good when used properly.”
Wow the word police are here. The word police are usually people who are strong in grammar but computer illiterate (and not knowledgeable about much else either).
Ron, try writing a post which says something useful about ZFS rather than pathetically trying to find a real world use for your liberal arts education.
“The filesystem automatically does the necessary byte swapping for each platform to properly read the disk.”
True, but if you move a big endian disk to a little endian system you still pay the penalty for each block until that block is re-written on that platform.
“currently offers that neither ZFS or UFS offer, so I highly doubt Apple will abandon HFS, if anything there will be work done to integrate some of the features of ZFS into HFS.”
Apple are not innovating here, they’re integrating an existing file system from a 3rd party. I doubt they’ll do anything other than keep integrating the latest versions.
One little, two little, three little endians.
Leap.
“Ron, try writing a post which says something useful about ZFS rather than pathetically trying to find a real world use for your liberal arts education.”
What’s ZFS then? Or is it than? That’s right, you don’t know.
Can’t we all just get along and eat me?
Oh c’mon, don’t be all so negative !!
I’m already so in love with ZFS and I truly hope they come in colours !
I want mine in pink, pretty pleeeeease…
Yottabyte File System….
Kinda makes my 20 Petabyte SAN seem rather puny.
“What’s ZFS then? Or is it than? That’s right, you don’t know.”
Ron, that post was completely incoherent. Did you get your liberal arts education through the mail?
Why no one has mentioned Leopard SERVER yet totally escapes me. This might not have much of a use on the desktop, but if I want to have a bunch of Xserves and Xserve RAIDs in my enterprise this is huge.
MDN word “all”. As in “all your base belongs to us”.
160MB ZFS partition. Wow! That’s a big ‘un!
But anway, surely if Apple were going to include ZFS support they would also provide a GUI for wrapping all the command line tools – like managing pools and snapshots. Where’s that?
erm who’s to say apple haven’t further developed zfs to make it bootable? it is open source after all
Steve said in the last Keynote as he was demonstrating the notes feature in Mail.app, “Be sure to blow Vista away.” This may be a big part of it.
I think ZFS is just a play on AFS. Same thing.
(1) Time Machine is NOT based on ZFS. For starters, Time Machine works on, and is in fact intended for, boot volumes whereas, according to this report, OS X can not boot on a ZFS formatted disk. I can’t say anything more.
(2) Apple will not make ZFS their default file system for Leopard. According to this report they haven’t even shipped a developer preview with ZFS as the default, and at this point it’s way too late in their development cycle to make that kind of MAJOR change. I can’t say anything more about Leopard, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, and in fact suspect that, ZFS will be the default in 10.6. The ZFS file system was only recently open-sourced by Sun along with their DTrace monitoring facility. These are two very high quality pieces of software — the best of the best, and they are both actively maintained by Sun. Apple is already including DTrace in Leopard and they have an eye for, and a history of, incorporating the best of the best from the world of open source software.
(3) Don’t fixate on rumors like this. Spend the time learning more about what’s included in Tiger — there’s already more there than most anyone realizes. The future will take care if itself, at least in Apple’s case. Trust me, the foundations are being laid for an absolute Goddess of an OS. The magnitude of OS X’s advantages compared to any other OS isn’t just growing; no, the rate of growth itself is growing, and the rate of that acceleration is going to increase, and so on and so on unto the 7th derivative. You’re already part of the coming revolution. Don’t try to get ahead of it. But do be sure to keep up.
Poor, sad little Leap!
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Leap was so upset that it took Microsoft ELEVEN YEARS to catch up to Apple’s filesystem (Mac had long filenames in 1984, Microsoft couldn’t do it until 1995), that’s he’s trolling a Mac site, stating than Apple is playing “catch-up”.
Poor little Leap? At least Apple can implement a “good thing” without taking more than a decade to do it!
Be happy with your copy of Vista, thousands of hackers are waiting for you
“Poor little Leap? At least Apple can implement a “good thing” without taking more than a decade to do it!”
Bob, I can’t believe you’re comparing addition of long file names under Windows 95 to a file system of the sophistication of NTFS or ZFS, or that you’re comparing them to MFS or HFS.
It shows a complete lack of understanding of what makes a file system robust and perform well to think that long file names are the most important feature of a file system. You’re not even qualified to read the discussion let alone join it.
You would have better just to say FAT Sucks and FAT32 Sucks too, as did MFS and original HFS.
It is a fact since NTFS was introduced in 1993, Microsoft’s consistently had the more sophisticated file system.
Poor little Leap!
Now he’s so upset, that he has resorted to putting words into people’s mouths!
Leap, you seem reasonably well read, so I’m requesting you re-read my original post, then point out “where” I stated that “long file names are the most important feature of a file system”.
Poor little Leap, you’re not even qualified to read my comment, let alone comment on it.
Leap, it’s time for you to take your troll ball and go home. You’re not making any friends here and you’re not making any sense, either.
“It is a fact since NTFS was introduced in 1993, Microsoft’s consistently had the more sophisticated file system.”
This isn’t the first place I’ve heard this. However, I would like for someone to explain to me why, if NTFS is so advanced, it takes several *minutes* to search a typical Windows XP hard drive for files with a particular name.
OS X, on the other hand, even before the introduction of Spotlight and indexing, could perform a search for a file name across an entire drive in a matter of about 5-10 seconds.
Maybe it’s just that sometimes, sophistication = bloat.