ZFS And Leopard, Yes And No

First Jonathan Schwartz came and announced that ZFS had been adopted by Apple as the filesystem in Leopard. Then Brian Croll, senior director of product marketing for the Mac OS, said, 'ZFS is not happening,' when asked whether Sun's Zettabyte File System would be in Leopard. Now, Apple has issued another statement clarifying the entire mess. It appears that yes, ZFS will be present in Leopard, but it will not be the default filesytem, and that it will only be supported as a read-only option.

It looks like ZFS will definitely be one of the file systems supported in Leopard, but only as a read-only option. The default filesystem will continue to be HFS+, the same file system that is used by Tiger. Much like NTFS, ZFS will be supported, but users will only be able to read files on such volumes, not write to them.

Brian Croll, senior director of Mac OS X Product Marketing explained, "ZFS is not the default file system for Leopard. We are exploring it as a file system option for high-end storage systems with really large storage. As a result, we have included ZFS -- a read-only copy of ZFS -- in Leopard. Read-only means that at a later date, if there are ZFS volumes, those systems would be able to read ZFS volumes. You cannot write data into the system. It will allow you to read ZFS volumes later".

Apple adopting ZFS entirely is not a matter of if, but a matter of when, for many industry observers. However, considering that Sun hasn't even gotten around to doing this for Solaris 10, it is not surprising that Apple has not taken the leap.
The news comes as a disappointment as ZFS offers many advantages over the filesystems currently used in OS X and Windows.