14 DAY TRIAL // Over 1,000 people have signed a petition calling on Apple to include support for OpenGL 4.3 and the ZFS file system in the company’s upcoming Mac OS. Apple is known to be testing OS X 10.9 internally.
As the Cupertino giant is probably preparing to release the first OS X 10.9 betas to developers, a petition at change.org has gone live asking the Mac maker to include two big things in the operating system: support for OpenGL 4.3 and ZFS.
“Apple has already started working on OS X 10.9. As a [sic] Apple user, I would like them to include two things in the new operating system,” reads the petition, which asks every signee to post their name.
“1.) HFS+ is an extension of HFS that was developed in the 1980s. ZFS is a modern file system able to address huge drives and provide stability. I would like to see ZFS or the equivalent in the new operating system.”
“2.) Apple supports OpenGL 3.2, which was released back in 2009. OpenGL 4.3 was just released and would give the Apple platform parity with Microsoft in graphics libraries, security and performance.”
While the OpenGL thing is probably already underway at Apple, the ZFS support could still be a low priority affair for the company.
90 percent of the Mac install base probably doesn’t even know what ZFS is, let alone require its functionality for day to day tasks.
The cry is mostly coming from pro users, who are requesting support for the file system for protection against data corruption, support for high storage capacities, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs, and continuous integrity checking and automatic repair.
Considering Apple has probably put together the basis of OS X 10.9 to ship its first test build to developers, this petition probably arrives a bit too late.