“Over the past couple of years, there’s been a lot of talk about bringing ZFS, Sun’s open source high-performance file system, to Mac OS X. Our man Siracusa first pointed out a message from an Apple developer last year expressing a desire to work on porting the file system to Apple’s OS, and talked more about its possible ties (or lack thereof) to Time Machine not long after. Even more recently, ZFS became accessible under OS X thanks to the MacFUSE project. Still, there’s been little word on the state of ZFS for OS X recently,” Erik Kennedy reports for Ars Technica.
“Now, it looks as though the port is not just wishful thinking, but an active project,” Kennedy reports.
Full article here.
Related articles:
Report: ZFS is now ‘officially’ supported in Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard – December 17, 2006
Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard to feature new file system? – August 16, 2006
INTERRRRRESTING
Does this mean I can run Windows apps on OSX?
Yawn, no idea what this means!
“Does this mean I can run Windows apps on OSX?”
what does this have to do with windows :s
maniMac:
What it means is that you will soon be able to run Windows apps on your Mac…under Zee Frackin’ Sea. That’s right: underwater.
ZFS is a next-gen file system with some excellent data-integrity and data-cloud abilities. Of course, if you don’t care about file systems, you won’t care about this. In that case, what it means is: more and better options, and a improved file experience. If you want to know more, go read Ars.
ZFS is a new kind of file system. It will probably eventually replace HFS+ which is what most Mac users currently use. ZFS can scale better and is more resilient than other older alternatives like NTFS, used by Windows.
Leopard will likely support ZFS through disk utility (it’s removed in the more recent Leopard builds), but the OS file system will still be HFS+. ZFS will probably come in with the next OS update (10.6 vs. OS 11).
Thought it was common knowledge:
1. ZFS is a formatting option in the dev previews (yea!). But bootable? Dunno.
2. TimeMachine does not use ZFS. I don’t know what it uses… But zfs has time machine like abilities for making lightweight snapshots/checkpoints of entire filesystems. (Double yea!)
ZFS support is seriously cool for wrapping up collections of disks into one big disk image. And end user would care since this sort of thing allows you to just add disks to your system and the single filesystem that you keep everything in would just appear to get bigger. No reformatting or partitioning. Plus your data is spread out over the disks. So if one dies it’s no big deal. Just put a new one in and your good to go.
It’s almost magic.
Why ZFS Matters: http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2006/8/15/4995
I thought I read that one of the cool benefits of ZFS was that you could add new hard drives to your system and instruct your computer to treat them all as one big hard drive. It works transparently in the background, so it looks like 1 big drive. That’s pretty nifty. Every time I buy a new drive, I’ve got to rearrange my files, which is a bit of a pain.
This means that OS X will leave Windows even further in the dust…
Here’s to hoping that Leopard is MILES ahead of Vista, not just on usability and security (which is already true w/Tiger), but also on powerful new features and under-the-hood improvements. Time to blow away Vista with features that M$ will not be able to copy for years, no matter how much money they throw at it!. Let’s put the M$ geeks to SHAME!
GO APPLE!
As a long time UNIX user and SA, ZFS and its SUN heritage means at least one thing: Apple is starting to taking the Enterprise more seriously. It should have pride of place in the new Leopard Server, and it’s another smack-down against Microsoft’s NTFS.
Happy birthday to me. My parents got me a Dell. Sucks. =(
Can anyone translate what this means into English?
ZFS is Much better than HFS…in fact it’s 18 times better! though it’s only slightly better than YFS which came out right after XFS. The greatest thing about ZFS is that it will always be the best EVER. there is no way to improve upon it…it’s impossible! well, i guess there might be a ΩFS someday? ah well…
@Notorious Dreamer, et al.
“What it means is that you will soon be able to run Windows apps on your Mac…under Zee Frackin’ Sea. That’s right: underwater.”
In a way, you are right. you could run a computer with a ZFS file system under the sea because if you were to fill the file system to capacity, it would vaporize any water surrounding it.
If you want some real geek reading, check this out:
http://blogs.sun.com/dcb/entry/zfs_boils_the_ocean_consumes
MW: “elements”
Honestly,
Why are there so many idiots that post asinine questions like “what does this post mean?”, “Will someone explain this to me?”, etc.
How the hell do people like that make it past 5th grade?
To those idiots who ask such asinine questions, here is my answer: You’re on the goddamn web! Ever heard of Google? Go look it up yourself and try to use your feeble little brains to comprehend, and stop asking the world to spoon feed everything to you!!!
Braindead idiots piss me off.
And here is the link to ask Digitimes why they think Leopard will be delayed until October:
http://www.digitimes.com/contact.asp
Did they have any real proof? Has Bootcamp been upgraded to accommodate Vista? Do they care? Of course not.
Ballmer and Gates laugh at Apple.
Let them laugh.
Man: Don’t be surprised. It’s Darwin in action.
Apple(?)Man (MDN’s site shows the Apple symbol as a square for some reason),
I gotta admit that I have done that sometimes. For me, I’m at work and busy and don’t have the time to look something up, but I do have the time to type a few lines on MDN. So I do.
It’s not that bad, AppleMan, just ignore the post or, even better, answer it – help out a fellow Mac user.
Except for Cubert. Cubert is cool. O.K., so people are busy. So, serious thought is too much.
I’m scared to think what shortcuts researchers are taking with the internet handy.
Lazy braindead idiots, perhaps?
It’s not that hard to search the ‘net, is it?
Ok – in an Apple briefing I attended the question of ZFS was explored extensively, especially because of the relevance to TIme Machine (the management of a storage resource at both the input to and output from TIme Machine). The Apple guys were quite explicit about the fact that ZFS will be highly supported in the future, but not yet – they speculated (strictly off the record) that 10.5.3ish would see greater ZFS integration starting to take place, but definitely not 10.5.