Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 7th Oct 2007 23:01 UTC
Developers have received from Apple a 'ZFS on Mac OS X Preview 1.1' package, which offers preliminary support for the ZFS file system, originally developed by Sun Microsystems for their Solaris OS. Currently, the Mac OS is based on the HFS+ file system, but leaked screenshots of earlier versions of Leopard showed options for formatting hard drives for ZFS. Reportedly, this preview allows full read and write capabilities with the latest developer build of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple's upcoming version of its OS X operating system.
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Member since:
2006-01-02
HFS is not a very modern filesystem. From what I've read, its internal data structures are not conducive to parallel create/delete/resize operations because all files are stored in a single B-Tree that was not designed with multiprocessing in mind. Then again, OS X was a really poor multiprocessing OS in general until Panther and it is still a work in progress after that.
Moving to ZFS will remove another bottleneck in the OS X kernel. HFS+ is a really old filesystem design and while replacing it, Apple is smart to pick the best new alternative in the non-GPL open-source world.