ZFS might/will be in Leopard...

[Bacillus]

I looked at the wiki on ZFS, and 90% of it is over my head - so is this good, great, not a big deal?

I guess the Jobs RDF will make it sound like the best thing since flash memory.

 

[CreativeMac]

I looked at the wiki on ZFS, and 90% of it is over my head - so is this good, great, not a big deal?

I guess the Jobs RDF will make it sound like the best thing since flash memory.

ZFS is coming, but for the time being it's no big deal. The most relavant item/drawback for most users is that ZFS currently isn't bootable - even in Solaris 10. OpenSolaris had boot support provided by the ZFS Boot team, but Solaris 10 won't get bootable ZFS until an update sometime later this year.

Even for most casual users, ZFS won't be a huge deal as its biggest advantages (from what I can see) are in how it deals with storage sets (pooling, RAID-Z, etc).

My guess is that 10.5/Leopard will support ZFS, but it probably won't be the default file system.

 

[santaliqueur]

if this is right, zfs will be the default fs.

 

[The Hunter]

While I have no idea whether or not it's going to be the default FS in Leopard (a lot of people seem to be reading that into that comment, but it's far from definite) - it would make some sense.
Just because Solaris doesn't currently boot ZFS doesn't mean that it's impossible, either on Solaris or OSX, it's just a question of getting the coding sorted out, there's no inherent limitation that makes ZFS unbootable.

Secondly, while storage pools and RAID-Z are pretty cool, the biggest implication for Leopard would be snapshots. Currently in the dev builds Time Machine is implemented on HFS+, but ZFS snapshots are ideal for that purpose - much more efficient and reliable AFAIK.

If I had to bet on ZFS as the default system in Leopard, I would lean towards saying yes, for no other reason than it makes a lot of sense.

 

[CEpeep]

It has built-in file compression for the entire filesystem. There was a link posted earlier to some guy's blog where he was trying out ZFS and he was able to gain a lot more space as a result of all the compression.

 

[CreativeMac]

While I have no idea whether or not it's going to be the default FS in Leopard (a lot of people seem to be reading that into that comment, but it's far from definite) - it would make some sense.
Just because Solaris doesn't currently boot ZFS doesn't mean that it's impossible, either on Solaris or OSX, it's just a question of getting the coding sorted out, there's no inherent limitation that makes ZFS unbootable.

Secondly, while storage pools and RAID-Z are pretty cool, the biggest implication for Leopard would be snapshots. Currently in the dev builds Time Machine is implemented on HFS+, but ZFS snapshots are ideal for that purpose - much more efficient and reliable AFAIK.

If I had to bet on ZFS as the default system in Leopard, I would lean towards saying yes, for no other reason than it makes a lot of sense.

I generally agree, but was not making assumptions about the future. When I said that ZFS wasn't bootable, I didn't mean to imply that would always be the case. So I'm sorry if you inferred that from my comments. I would also agree that for ordinary users snapshots are by far the biggest implication for moving Leopard to ZFS, but my feeling is that that point is no more than academic until you can boot a ZFS volume. This is why I didn't mention that feature.

I'm thinking it's probably a 50/50 proposition whether ZFS will be the default file system for 10.5. I think a more pragmatic assumption is that ZFS may be the default file system on new systems that come with Leopard pre-installed. And it may be the default option when doing an Erase-and-Install from the Leopard DVD. But with the current install base, I think we can safely say that 10.5 would have to work on both HFS+ and ZFS. While ZFS may well support Time Machine much better than does HFS+, if moving from HFS+ to ZFS requires a backup/clone-reformat-then restore I think adoption of ZFS will be much slower.

 

[Grathrax]

I think it is likely that ZFS might be used solely for the Time Machine backup partition, but not the default. I could also see it being used in XServe and on the Mac pros where the benefits will show.