Commentary--Apple includes Sun ZFS File System Capability in Leopard After All

One disappointment along with the excellent new Leopard features demonstrated in Steve Jobs WWDC keynote address on Monday was the lack of any mention of the expected inclusion of Sun Microsystems' super industrial-strength file system called ZFS. It was expected because Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz had said it would be just a short time earlier. Afterward, when questioned about ZFS, a senior Apple manager was quoted as saying that Leopard would continue to use Apple's HFS+ file system, an apparent contradiction. Was Sun's CEO being punished for letting the ZFS detail slip before the WWDC keynote? It has happened before--remember ATI getting some time in the penalty box from Apple for a similar slip before a Macworld not too long ago? But probably not.

Apple explained, as noted in several reports, that there is no contradiction. In fact, ZFS will be included in Leopard but experimentally and as read-only via the command line interface while HFS will remain the main OS file system. In other words, when enabled via the command line interface in Leopard, one will be able to read data from ZFS-formatted drives but not write data to them. So everyone was right.

Does it really matter? Probably not. Most file systems are 32-bit or 64-bit and are robust enough for the next decade according to experts. Sun's ZFS is 128-bit so it is way out there in terms of mainstream operational utility. But it's cool that Leopard will be able to at least read ZFS-formatted drives--see this Web page for all you wanted to know about ZFS and then some. [Bill Fox]