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Apple to Use Sun's ZFS in 'Leopard'

By BetaNews Staff, BetaNews

June 6, 2007, 5:45 PM

Ahead of Apple's yearly developer conference, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz confirmed Wednesday that the next version of Mac OS X -- code-named Leopard and due in October -- will feature Sun's ZFS file system instead of Apple's HFS+ used previously.

The change to ZFS will bring numerous improvements, including checksums to protect data integrity and the ability to abstract storage space from physical drives using a virtual layer, making it easier to add space. ZFS snapshots also improve backup capabilities, and as a 128-bit file system, potential disk size is virtually unlimited. In addition, built-in compression increases performance by 2-3x, according to Sun.

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By Program86

posted Jun 7, 2007 - 10:24 AM

Very impressive. Its light years ahead of NTFS!

Score: 0

By imafurby

posted Jun 7, 2007 - 9:17 PM

Let me know how impressed you are when the real data on your "virtual layer" disappears never to be seen again.

Score: 0

By flake

posted Jun 7, 2007 - 10:15 AM

Great news! ZFS is arguably the most advanced filesystem out there, standing even above XFS.

I'm kind interested in just how Apple is dealing with the Resource fork thing in switching from HFS+ I can imagine this is where they're having the most hiccups.

Score: 0

By Paul Skinner

posted Jun 7, 2007 - 5:11 AM

This should be interesting.
ZFS has been having a few minor hicups as it's relativley new in the field of file systems.

Will be interesting to see if Apple quash (most of) them.

Score: 0

By DudeBoyz

posted Jun 6, 2007 - 8:38 PM

Wow - this is sounding incredibly cool - at least on the surface.

Wow... I may have to upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5 after all...

Score: 0

By ModderXManiac

edited Jun 6, 2007 - 7:15 PM

Better performance and native compression, that's worth it, even if it means a delay for debugging :)

Will the beta from WWDC use ZFS yet?
I've always used ext3 on linux, I find it to be quite slow, but I'm gonna try ZFS since it's an option and see if there are any benefits.

Score: 0

By Tene

posted Jun 7, 2007 - 8:56 AM

>I've always used ext3 on linux, I find it to be quite slow, but I'm gonna try ZFS since it's an option and see if there are any benefits.

Try XFS and JFS, they're performance monsters in their own right (just be sure to increase initramfs size beforehand). ZFS will take a while to get into the Linux kernel itself due to needing a re-write - licence issues - although there's a userspace driver for it atm.

Score: 0

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