Wednesday, June 6,2007 @ 5:05pm
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.