02/01, 3:00am
Company run by former ZFS Apple engineer
[Update: ZEVO web site is back up after prolonged outage] A former Apple engineer who worked on ZFS integration in Leopard and Snow Leopard has debuted a new software program to implement full ZFS support on the Mac. The alternative disk formatting, which offers a more efficient way to utilize disk space and actively prevents file corruption among other benefits, was touted by Sun Microsystems and considered by Apple as a possible replacement for HFS, but ultimately abandoned due to licensing issues.
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10/26, 11:35am
Sour negotiations may be to blame
Support for ZFS was ultimately dropped from Snow Leopard as a result of licensing issues, claims Jeff Bonwick, a project team leader at Sun. The technology was initially expected to be a highlight of Snow Leopard, for instance providing image-based backups, and eliminating the need for drive partitions. Hints that ZFS had been removed came in June however, and the technology is nowhere to be found in shipping copies of the OS.
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10/23, 4:25pm
Company may be working on its own alternative
Despite previous efforts to bring support for the ZFS file-system to Mac OS X, Apple has dropped the project. Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz several years ago publicly claimed Leopard would utilize ZFS instead of HFS+, although Apple only provided limited support for the new technology. Even the read-only functionality was dropped with the transition to Snow Leopard.
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06/23, 4:05pm
Quiet Snow Leopard changes
A number of important changes are being brought to Mac OS X Snow Leopard that have not been well-publicized, a new report notes. Even though Apple has described the forthcoming operating system as an attempt to refine Leopard rather than make dramatic changes, it should for instance introduce a comprehensive multi-touch framework, which will help developers implement commands currently coded exclusively by Apple.
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06/23, 4:55am
ZFS in Snow Leopard
Amongst a host of high profile releases and announcements at this year's WWDC, Apple finally confirmed what has been an open secret for over a year -- Suns ZFS filesystem is coming to Mac OS X 10.6 codenamed 'Snow Leopard'. Overshadowed by some of the more headline=friendly developments such as improved multicore support, OpenCL and 'Grand Central', ZFS support could turn out to be one of the most important developments in OS X.
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