At the Worldwide Developer Conference currently underway in San Fransisco, Apple unveiled some of the new features coming in Mac OS X Server 10.6, Snow Leopard. Of course the new release gets the same improvements as the client version, but in addition to those, there are a few server-specific features underway too.First of all, ZFS read and write support will be included in Snow Leopard Server. ZFS is a “128-bit ZFS file system, which includes advanced features such as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots”.
In addition, Snow Leopard will get new versions of iCal Server, Podcast Server, Mail Server, and Address Book Server. Snow Leopard will also include better and expanded collaboration tools and more elaborate remote access options, including a push notifications server that works outside of your firewall.
But they STILL haven’t answered if PowerPC is going to be supported or not! I’ve got a Quad 2.5GHz PowerMac G5 and don’t feel its time for it to retire, does Apple?
I think a better way of looking at things is does your G5 meet your requirements? Does Snow Leopard offer anything that would make you more productive to the point where a hardware upgrade would be a good idea?
Screenshots show all applications, minus BootCamp to be Universal.
It’s likely the PowerPC G5 series are the last of the PowerPC machines to be supported, even if they can’t support the full 64-bit address space.
They probably won’t answer the question until the last minute when they learn it for themselves.
The PowerPC 970 (G5 in Apple parlance) does support both 32-bit and 64-bit Power ISA, so there shouldn’t be any technical reasons why they couldn’t. Supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit is actually quite a bit simpler on the 970, as it is able to switch between those modes on the fly.
Plus, 10.5 all ready supports a 64-bit Power runtime for userland, and so 10.6 just seems to be bringing 64-bit to the kernel as well.
Yes, the 970 and 970FX support both ISAs but they also support a 42-bit address space.
So it seems ZFS is now official for Mac OS X server, is this the case for Snowleopard too?
… and nobody hears it. Does it exist?
I wonder if you’ll be able to boot into ZFS? I further wonder if they will manage to make it to where a ZFS partition can be your primary partition?
Can storage be removed from a Z pool without risking data integrity such as an external hard drive?
Can ZFS be used with meta-data tagging or even a WinFS type metadata system?
You probably shouldn’t put internal and external drives into the same pool. I saw a slide claiming that the ability to remove disks will (finally) appear in Solaris in September. You’ll be able to remove a disk as long as the free space in the pool is larger than the size of the disk.
ZFS supports extended attributes; it’s no BeFS but AFAIK it’s better than HFS+.
Wonder if Apple will finally make 10.6 server installable on off the shelf Intel / AMD hardware. I like the Mac server but don’t want to buy a Mac just for that. But I would buy the OS if I can put in on an HP or Dell server.
That would be sweet.
Also with all this 64 Bit talk, wonder how that is going to affect 32 bit apps. Is it going to be like some other 64 Bit OS’s where it’s all or nothing. Or will they have a run time like Rosetta that will allow 32 bit apps to run?