ZFS on Mac: Now it’s official!
But we knew it all along
Infoworld published a follow-up clarifying Apple’s inclusion of ZFS in Mac OS X 10.5.0. And doing quite a bit of tap dancing.
Apple now says that the ZFS file system will be available in the forthcoming Mac operating system, sort of.
Seeking to clarify a statement made on Monday by Brian Croll, senior director of Mac OS X Product Marketing, to two InformationWeek reporters that Apple’s new “Leopard” operating system would not include the ZFS file system, an Apple spokesperson indicated that ZFS would be available as a limited option, but not as the default file system.ZFS “is only available a read-only option from the command line,” according to an Apple spokesperson.
In a follow-up interview today, Croll explained, “ZFS is not the default file system for Leopard. We are exploring it as a file system option for high-end storage systems with really large storage. As a result, we have included ZFS — a read-only copy of ZFS — in Leopard.”
“Read-only means that at a later date, if there are ZFS volumes, those systems would be able to read ZFS volumes,” Croll added. “You cannot write data into the system. It will allow you to read ZFS volumes later.”
Asked whether ZFS might be implemented for Apple’s Xserve rack mountable server line, Croll said, “Where we head in the future, we’re not able to talk about.”
Apple omerta aside, the direction is clear even if the timetable is not.
Update: ZFS clone on Linux: Chris Mason announced that he’s releasing something that looks like a ZFS clone for Linux.
[ANNOUNCE] Btrfs: a copy on write, snapshotting FS
Maybe you could help him. [Thanks, Wes.]
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
on June 14th, 2007 at 1:29 am
I’m a bit disappointed to find that ZFS is not as prominent in Leopard as was first anticipated. From the noises made by many before Monday’s keynote, it seemed as though ZFS would be a major part of the Leopard launch. Now it seems to be a sideshow only. Hopefully, this will chnage at a later date but it would seem to be a year or two in the future.
Or perhaps Dominic Giampaolo is cooking up something completely new in the Apple filesystems group
on June 14th, 2007 at 6:21 am
Come on - it’s hard to take XServes and/or OS X seriously for real enterprise-grade projects. A comparable x86 server is half the cost, double (or more) the speed, and at least double (or more) the storage. All of this while running an OS (Linux, FreeBSD, etc) that can be managed in bulk from a command line - the Apple tech support folks freak out if any command-line commands are mentioned.
Apple gets a lot of points for being the non-Microsoft, but they are every bit as closed and proprietary that MS is.