Crumbs
Rich T finds some tasty titbits you might have missed in the week's news
Thursday 7 June 2007, 4:45 PM
Mac OS X to adopt ZFS
So Apple's forthcoming operating system will use the next-generation file system ZFS, it's been confirmed.
Sun Microsystems' chief executive Jonathan Schwartz gave the secret away on Wednesday when he said ZFS would succeed HFS+ in Leopard, Apple's name for the successor to OS X.
Zettabyte File System was originally developed by Sun, and it's significantly better than traditional file systems.
My US colleague Declan McCullagh blogged with more details.
PreviousComments on this post
I spent a little too much of my young life working on a networked server product (MainLAN 386, about which not much should be said), so got down and dirty with filing system design. Making something that's reliable, fast, reliable, extensible, reliable, flexible, reliable and reliable is very difficult.
ZFS looks really very interesting indeed, and if the claims are true it will be revolutionary. I've had a look through some of the Sun documentation, and it's impressive - although I'd like to see a discussion of how it works for very large databases, and for inherently unreliable/disconnectable storage.
Perhaps I should write an article on it. That's normally the best way to learn about something, next to actually implementing it...
