To be more sporting, I’ll bet that Apple supports ZFS as the default file system on at least one version of Mac OS by September 1, 2007.

FWIW, I *don’t* believe Apple has the expertise to produce a product as advanced as ZFS in the next two years. I’ve met the ZFS team and I was very impressed – and I’ve worked with some very smart teams. I know, Apple’s hired some super smart FS guys in the last couple of years, and if you ask them, they can do even *better*. But they wouldn’t be very smart engineers if they didn’t believe they could be better, now would they?

If Apple wants to keep the pressure up on Vista, ZFS is one ballsy way to do it. I think they’re going for it. In the next 12 months. I’m looking forward to ice-cold vodka Gimlet, up, with cool jazz in the background. See you there, John.

I think HFS+ will remain the default volume format in Leopard. I don’t think the ZFS port will be ready in time for 10.5.0 (it may work enough to play with, but the port won’t be “production ready” for some time). I also don’t think ZFS will replace HFS+ as the default volume format for Mac OS X in the next two years.

I think Apple has the expertise and experience in-house to make a new file system for Mac OS X. Whether it chooses to do so or not remains to be seen.

Seriously, unless they got an early start and did a suitably brilliant design job, they’ll be hard pressed to beat ZFS. Of course, if they did, I’d love it, because we all benefit.

So John, I’ll bet you a beer at the Tied House in Mountain View (I’m assuming you are in the Valley somewhere) that Apple goes with ZFS. Do I have a bet?

Their what now? Apple’s whole OS was NIH! Then there’s KHTML/KJS, Postfix, Apache, SQLite, OpenSSH, ZeroConf, Jabber, OpenGL, and on and on. Apple’s clearly over that particular syndrome.

The “Nexenta” OS is listed at DistroWatch and mentioned in some Sun Blogs.
It is the OpenSolaris kernel, GNU Linux plus Debian Linux. ZFS is available with the OpenSolaris kernel and Linux features are available with GNU and Debian Linux.

To test drive ZFS many people install VMware, the VMware server is free at the moment, over Linux or Windows. Then they install OpenSolaris, or Solaris 10 which is free, and play with ZFS. The reports of replacing LVM (Linux) operations and tasks are ecstatic. Much easier to use. Much more powerful.

At the Personal Computing, SOHO and low-end SMB, Robin’s “media servers. Someone is going to win big here” is very true. The business driver for all SMBs will be “The Long Tail”.

In an IT world becoming increasingly “Information Centric” ZFS is currently the best tool available.

There are some additional indications for an integration of ZFS into Leopard: ZFS On Apple’s Leopard: Drops Of Fuel On The Embers…

A couple of key points:

• No more Disk Warrior. Bit rot banished forever. In three years your entry level iMac will have a 1 TB disk. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that every block contains exactly what the system thinks it does? HFS+ can’t. ZFS does.
• Home media servers. Someone is going to win big here, but only at consumer price points and with great reliability. ZFS means the benefits of RAID without the cost: no controllers, no dual port caches, no finicky configuration and management. Just add disk drives the way we add RAM today.
• True snapshot copies. No one has published an explanation of Time Machine works. For now it looks like a combo of journaling and rsync, with uncertain benefits for handling daily multiple file versions or rollback to a pre-fubar’d OS version. ZFS handles all that gracefully and with low overhead.

I’m sure smart engineers could come up with more cool things for the single user, but your question prompts me to wonder – in the multi-PC home with fast wireless networks will there be a dividing line between low-end servers and single user systems? Hm-m.

If I read what you are saying correctly, this does indicate that Apple is working on ZFS. That’s very good news. Would you please go over to the Apple Insider forum I linked to and tell them what this means? They don’t seem to get it.

Just one thing: I may ignorant, which I freely admitted to in the post – so I’m not totally ignorant, but I have to refuse to accept honorific “moron”. Some of our elected officials in Washington D.C. have taken that one to new lows and I just don’t think I can compete. Cheers.

This is a case of someone looking for quartz and striking gold.

All filesystems on MacOS X are implemented using what’s called VFS plugins, these interact with the kernel. The vnode is the focus of all file activity, that list tells me that the vnode is now ZFS aware which means there is or was a corresponding VFS plugin in a lab somewhere.

Look at the file list, those are all the VFS types the MacOS X XNU kernel supports…+1. If they’ve added ZFS to the vnode.h list it means it was or has been in development. If it was in development it’ll vanish from that list when the next build is released, if it still is in development it’ll stay.