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ZFS To Become Default File System In Leopard

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Apr 12, 2001
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Perhaps overcome with excitement (and forgetting that Apple doesn't like such pre-emptive disclosures), Sun's Jonathan Schwartz announced today at Sun event in Washington D.C. that Apple would be making ZFS "the file system" in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard (video link, requires RealPlayer).

In fact, this week you'll see that Apple is announcing at their Worldwide Developer Conference that ZFS has become the file system in Mac OS 10.
Click to expand...

Rumors of Apple's interest in ZFS began in April 2006, when an OpenSolaris mailing list revealed that Apple had contacted Sun regarding porting ZFS to OS 10. The file system later began making appearances in Leopard builds.

ZFS has a long list of improvements over Apple's current file system, Journaled HFS+. More information on ZFS is available at the ZFS homepage and Wikipedia.

For live coverage of WWDC (text and photos), you know where to turn.
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2007/06/06/zfs-to-become-default-file-system-in-leopard/
Great news--hopefully this is part of Apple creating a huge update to Finder.
 
This is very good news. ZFS is an awesome file system. This will also hopefully make compatibility with other OS's better too.
-Ted
 
I've been hoping for this, but...

how will existing Tiger users handle a system upgrade?

Have Apple and Sun come up with a way to migrate a user's setup from one file system to another??
 
come someone explain this poor noob what ZFS system is and what it does as well as benefits of it?
 
If this is true it is probably what caused the delay ...but well worth it!!
 
Was anyone else hoping that this wouldn't be the case? ZFS is definitely an improvement over HFS+, but there are new file system advancements that aren't in ZFS, and I'd like for Apple to use something cutting edge.
 
From the sound of it, ZFS will be a big improvement, but (other than the theoretical limitless size of disks/files) how exactly does this benefit the end user?
 
dabirdwell said:
how will existing Tiger users handle a system upgrade?

Have Apple and Sun come up with a way to migrate a user's setup from one file system to another??
Click to expand...

Suppose it could work like the FAT32 to NTFS upgrade.

Bring on ZFS, if it isn't the defualt but can boot from it then I will be using ZFS anyway.

From earlier reports it seems like they have fully got behind ZFS which is good for all mac users.
 
ZFS creates sort of a "pool," right? Like if I plug in another hard drive, I don't see it as an individual drive, my free space just goes up?

How would that work with things like thumb drives where you want specific files on specific devices? What about things like scratch disks for video capture?

ZFS is exciting, I'm not trying to complain. Just curious. ;)
 
Interesting numbers from wikipedia:

  • 2^48 — Number of snapshots in any file system (2 × 10^14)
  • 2^48 — Number of files in any individual file system (2 × 10^14)
  • 16 exabytes (2^64 byte) — Maximum size of a file system
  • 16 exabytes (2^64 byte) — Maximum size of a single file
  • 16 exabytes (2^64 byte) — Maximum size of any attribute
  • 3 × 10^23 petabytes (2^78 byte) — Maximum size of any zpool
  • 2^56 — Number of attributes of a file (actually constrained to 2^48 for the number of files in a ZFS file system)
  • 2^56 — Number of files in a directory (actually constrained to 2^48 for the number of files in a ZFS file system)
  • 2^64 — Number of devices in any zpool
  • 2^64 — Number of zpools in a system
  • 2^64 — Number of file systems in a zpool
If 1,000 files were created every second, it would take about 9,000 years to reach the limit of the number of files.



Edit: crap, the superscripts didn't copy over. Just see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettabyte_File_System


Should be enough to last us awhile :D
 
syklee26 said:
come someone explain this poor noob what ZFS system is and what it does as well as benefits of it?
Click to expand...

Try starting with this:

http://tech.zamwi.com/2007/01/16/why-do-geeks-have-lust-for-zfs/

Basically, a couple of the big things are that ZFS will really work nicely with Time Machine, and the whole idea of pooled storage.

Right now, if your hard drive fills up, even if you have space for another hard drive, you add the new one in, format it, and it appears as a separate volume. Say now you have your old 160GB volume plus a new 500GB volume. You have to decide if you want to clone all the contents of your old drive onto the new drive and then get rid of the old drive, only keep certain kinds of files on the new drive (then you have to remember to navigate there, etc, etc). In ZFS, the basic idea is that, you had 160GB of space, you plug in the new drive, now you have 760GB of space -- the new hard drive gives you new space without having to copy things over or use different volumes or anything like that.
 
dabirdwell said:
how will existing Tiger users handle a system upgrade?

Have Apple and Sun come up with a way to migrate a user's setup from one file system to another??
Click to expand...

You probably would have to install the new OS onto another harddrive and then use the Migration Assistant to move over all your stuff.
 
ppc_michael said:
ZFS creates sort of a "pool," right? Like if I plug in another hard drive, I don't see it as an individual drive, my free space just goes up?

How would that work with things like thumb drives where you want specific files on specific devices? What about things like scratch disks for video capture?

ZFS is exciting, I'm not trying to complain. Just curious. ;)
Click to expand...

AFAIK, you can choose whether or not a device is in a pool, so you can have separate pools. The thumb drive (which is probably FAT32 making it a moot point anyways, but lets assume it's ZFS) would be its own separate "pool" consisting of it and nothing else. You could have 2 hard drives, and they can both be in the same "pool" or again, be separate "pools". Much like RAID arrays. I would assume that unless you specifically define pools, by default, each device will be independent
 
ppc_michael said:
ZFS creates sort of a "pool," right? Like if I plug in another hard drive, I don't see it as an individual drive, my free space just goes up?

How would that work with things like thumb drives where you want specific files on specific devices? What about things like scratch disks for video capture?

ZFS is exciting, I'm not trying to complain. Just curious. ;)
Click to expand...

Well it seems to me that if the thumb drive or scratch drive were formatted as FAT32, it wouldn't be compatible with the pool, would it? Only ZFS formatted drives would be pooled? Is that right?
 
File systems

If they are switching their default OS, I'm wondering if this is possible since they don't have to worry about supporting Classic mode any longer.

One thing I'd love to see is proper read and write capabilities to NTFS drives. It would make sharing external drives even better than limiting the drives to FAT32.
 
mkrishnan said:
Say now you have your old 160GB volume plus a new 500GB volume. [...] In ZFS, the basic idea is that, you had 160GB of space, you plug in the new drive, now you have 760GB of space.
Click to expand...

That would be truly revolutionary, I'd be happy with 660 GB on the combined drive system.
 
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