back to article Leopard gets dose of Solaris ZFS

Apple has apparently admitted its next operating system will utilize Sun Microsystems’ ZFS encrypted file system, contradicting earlier denials. In a display of corporate left-hand/right-hand syndrome, Apple has reportedly confirmed comments made by Sun’s chief executive Jonathan Schwartz last week that Sun’s 128-bit ZFS for …

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  1. Grant

    Jobs was pissed at losing his thunder

    Jobs was pised sun stole his thunder about ZFS so did not talk about it. Seems to fit pretty well in to Jobs MO. Rember ATI rage leak anyone?

  2. Clay Garland

    Well, I guess. . .

    I guess this means that I will wait until Leopard to do a clean install.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Leaky Dick

    It was Karl Rove's pal Dick Cheney.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why Apple won't engage the Reg

    Could it be that Steve still recalls the way The Reg ridiculed his California pronunciation "jag-wire"? Well, maybe memories will fade with the upcoming release of Leper . . .

  5. Urs Keller

    ZFS not bootable

    Currently, as to my knowledge, not even Solaris can boot from ZFS. This means that you'll need an HFS+ file system for OS X in any case.

    Sorry, Clay, not yet time for a clean install ...

  6. Rich Silver badge

    Is this good?

    Is ZFS case-sensitive? If so, it would be a great improvement on HFS and would mean that the standard unix tools actually work correctly instead of getting confused over whether they think a file exists or it doesn't depending on whether or not Apple have got round to hacking that particular util to make it case-insensitive aware.

    Oh, and if it would not randomly change the case of a filename from lower to upper case then that would be dandy too!

    God I HATE my Mac!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Try HFS case sensitive if you need it

    No need to wait for ZFS, you can specify HFS+ to be case-sensitive if you want. It does need a reformat and there may be some (many?) issues with apps expecting a mac disk to be case-insensitive, but the option is there.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hmm...

    Have apple actually written any of their OS? Other than the UI, that is?

  9. Dave

    ZFS Is bootable...

    ZFS is bootable, or at least, it is in Solaris, the next question is, will OSX support Z-RAID?

  10. florian mosleh

    Re: Hmm...

    Umm... the XNU kernel that runs the thing?

  11. Demian Phillips

    ZFS

    I have banged togeather a raidz2 filesystem on a FC array (linux os) and it is case aware.

  12. Dillon Pyron

    Left hand-right had

    Imagine, a vendor suffering from the left hand - right hand syndrome. How unique.

  13. Hyperchaotic

    Re: Hmm...

    They've written lots of the plumbing for OS X themselves but the important thing is that taking in proven and stable software is often a lot better than writing everything from scratch. Other OS well known software houses have tried that and come up with buggy beta-quality software claiming it to be final.

    Apple is really doing the right thing by mixing home-brewed software with proven stuff made by others and this is why they can release a major new OS release, that is stable, so often.

  14. Fred Fnord

    More info

    A little more data: Apple now says that ZFS will appear in Leopard but it will be read-only, at least for the moment.

    And as for case-sensitivity... yuch. The single dumbest idea I've heard in a long time. The only reason to have case-sensitive filenames is so that you can have 'Readme.txt' 'README.TXT' 'readme.txt' and 'ReAdMe.TxT' in the same directory. Which is an abomination.

    Computers are supposed to do things for the convenience of their operators, not the other way around. All of the positive aspects to case-sensitive filesystems are for the computer or the programmer, not for the operator.

    Reminds me of a Linux program I once worked on. I was talking to the original author and he said 'Okay, take a look for that in the something.h header file' (I can't remember the real name). So I typed 'vi something.h' (in the project/headers directory) and it opened a file. I said 'I don't see that definition in there,' and he said, 'Oh, it's probably in the capital-something.h'. I said 'What?' and he said 'Try SOMETHING.h, all caps'. Yup, it was in there. He had decided to split the rather long 'something.h' into two files and claimed that this was easier to remember even than 'something1.h' and 'something2.h'.

    Oh, and you should have seen the variable names.

    I quit the team shortly thereafter.

    -fred

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    lower case madness

    Fred,

    or is it fred, do you think the world should be flat too?

    maybe we will rewrite the bible and the constitution to accommodate windows and dos users.

    i did it all in lower case so it is easier to understand :)

  16. Robert A. Rosenberg

    Why do I need to reformat to make Case-Sensitive?

    The ONLY difference between a volume/partition that is formatted as CS or Non-CS is a flag in the directory. Since a Non-CS partition can NOT have file names that would be duplicates if rendered as all lower case, all that SHOULD be needed to go from Non-CS to CS is to flip the flag and update an in-memory tables that show the CS/Non-CS status. An attempt to convert a CS partition to Non-CS is harder and would actually need for the partition to be unmounted (to prevent adds/deletes) while the directory is scanned for duplicate Non-CS file names before the flag is reset or an error message was issued.

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