06/06/2007, 5:05pm, EDT

Wednesday, June 6th

Sun CEO: ZFS will be the Leopard filesystem

At a Sun Microsystems media event today, company CEO Jonathan Schwartz publicly stated that the default filesystem for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will be ZFS, replacing the current HFS+ Extended filesystem. ZFS is a filesystem developed by Sun that is 128-bit, meaning it offers 16 billion billion times the capacity of 32- or 64-bit systems -- virtually unlimited by today's standards. ZFS also offers increased performance because it is transactional object model rather than more traditional I/O mechanisms.

Another purported benefit of ZFS is the elimination of various administration and maintenance routines required by other filesystems. For instance, the fsck command never has to be run, even if the system is shut down in an unclean fashion -- the creators claim that ZFS has never lost data integrity or leaked a single block after thousands of forced violent crashes.

According to Schwartz, Apple will announce that it is adopting ZFS during next week's WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference) in San Francisco.

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ccrider

cool

06/06, 5:27pm, EDT

fsck yeah!

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Guest

wonderful news!

06/06, 5:36pm, EDT

http://www.itwistngo.com/

chadpengar

we'll see if true

06/06, 5:40pm, EDT

I doubt that they would replace HFS+ with ZFS without first making ZFS an option to get a lot of real world feedback. ZFS from Sun is not even bootable yet (in released form). Apple could have fixed that of course but I would bet against it being the default for now. ZFS is cool and I am looking forward to it.

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roller

sounds great

06/06, 5:43pm, EDT

Now, if October would just get here...

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roller

Sounds great

06/06, 5:45pm, EDT

Now, if October would just get here...

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rubaiyat

Backward compatibility?

06/06, 6:41pm, EDT

Is this going to cause another gulf between users?

I just like to get at my own and everyone else's files without requiring the latest "New-Improved, 94% fat free" electric letter opener, now ONLY available from Apple (under licence from Sun).

More usefully: How about an announcement that Apple will universally adopt all open-source file formats?

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leamanc

NDA

06/06, 8:25pm, EDT

Is Sun excluded from non-disclosure agreements? Anyone else "revealing" Leopard features would face the wrath of Apple legal.

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Eriamjh

Wrath of Apple legal?

06/06, 9:12pm, EDT

Who cares about that. What about the wrath of Steve? He'd get so pissed that he'd have the feature pulled from Leopard at the 11th hour!

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Terrin

Permission

06/06, 9:36pm, EDT

Jonathan Swartz has been around Silicon Valley for about as long as Jobs. They might even be friends. Sun after all was considering buying Apple at one point. I suspect Swartz received authorization before this announcement.

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Fast iBook

Apple in position

06/07, 12:36am, EDT

Apple is in position to purchase SUN, perhaps this is just the beginning, the tip of the iceberg. It would really give apple a grip on large systems integration software, and mainframe services, as well as finally having a fully "serious" attempt at servers etc aside from the rackmount xserve. Maybe i'm crazy. Who knows, but this sounds like a neat feature, and a good reason to upgrade.

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