Submitted by Some more details concerning Apple’s upcoming Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard release are trickling onto the web. First of all, as expected, Snow Leopard will include more thorough support for ZFS, but it’s reserved for the server releases. In addition to that, printer drivers on Snow Leopard will be delivered on demand, shaving off a few gigabytes of space off a default Mac OS X installation. The drivers will be obtained via Software Update if necessary.
While the snow leapord release is focusing on core stability it will provide write finctions in the client OS after a few point releases (in theory .2, but its notset in stone yet). Apple is still planning a full conversion but as 10.6 is focused on stability and making a better 10.5, this feature has been posponed until 10.7 where it should replace HFS+ entirely.
Cool,
so Linux can still be the first desktop OS with a next gen FS. (BTRFS is already in the kernel .. might be stable by the end of the year and might be default in distros coming out in 2010)
When is the successor to Snow Leopard planned?
Since Tiger Apple have officially switched to a 24-ish month release cycle, so the successor to Snow Leopard can be expected some time in 2011.
I personally sort of expected ZFS to be available only in Server for some time before being introduced to Mac OS X proper. Adding a new file system is bound to produce a bunch of headaches, some of them with potentially catastrophic outcome, so giving it first to people who supposedly know what they are doing (i.e the Server admins) is entirely understandable. And twenty four months of real world usage are a very effective way to snuff out most of the bugs. Then you can safely give it to your average Joe Shmoo.
Don’t you usually put you’re bleeding edge type stuff on consumer level products and leave you tried and true stuff for the server? Having to work on OS X server just about everyday I think Apple has it backwards. But I’m sure it’s because Apple is focused on the consumer market and not the Server market.
Normally I’d agree with you, but ZFS is more for the server anyway.
Releasing ZFS for the desktop first would be like introducing something like support for more than 16 processors for the desktop where nobody would be using it anyway.
Read the above posts to see why this isn’t true.
Also, with Snow Leapard this might not be true either as programs WILL start using multiple CPU/cores/GPUs.
Edited 2009-02-11 18:08 UTC
Pay attention to the words you use, “might” is the operative word in your post.
As for OS X only including zfs on server releases, I’m a bit disappointed though I can understand the decision. Still, it probably won’t be too hard to transplant the zfs support to the client version, though making it your root fs would require some effort. Still, if you really want it, it should be relatively easy to get it. Let’s not let this thread derail into a “linux vs OS X” war.
FreeBSD isn’t as much a desktop OS as “Linux”?
Except that FreeBSD has had ZFS support for over a year now, and has even shipped a full release with it enabled.
OpenSolaris?
BTRFS will not be production ready until 2012. This was also confirmed by the developers.
I seriously doubt ZFS will ever be the default FS for OSX, simply because of how many of Apple’s systems are notebooks. You don’t want a FS that’s going to eat tons of CPU and do lots of background operations on a notebook. Battery life….
Some more reasons here:
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/06/on_zfs_as…
I do wonder if HFS+ case-sensitivity might show up sometime soon. Case-insensitivity was around mainly to make legacy Carbon apps happy.
“I seriously doubt ZFS will ever be the default FS for OSX, simply because of how many of Apple’s systems are notebooks. You don’t want a FS that’s going to eat tons of CPU and do lots of background operations on a notebook. Battery life….”
All the features of ZFS that are really server centric do not need ot be enabled all the time, but instead on demand.
That’s nonsense. I’m running OpenSolaris happily on my eeepc, without any problems.
It’s not true that ZFS uses much CPU, but it likes memory. But memory is cheap nowadays.
ZFS works fine on my two year old Dell laptop. You have to remember that Sun is constantly working on improving ZFS, that article is from June 2007 there’s been at least 7 upgrades to Pool version of ZFS since then, by time 10.7 comes out there probably going to be a fair bit of revision in ZFS capabilities, that and no doubt the MacBookPro will be native quad core.
dubh@lugh:~$ cat /etc/release
OpenSolaris 2009.06 snv_106 X86
Copyright 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
Assembled 28 January 2009
dubh@lugh:~$ zpool upgrade -v
This system is currently running ZFS pool version 14.
The following versions are supported:
VER DESCRIPTION
— ——————————————————–
1 Initial ZFS version
2 Ditto blocks (replicated metadata)
3 Hot spares and double parity RAID-Z
4 zpool history
5 Compression using the gzip algorithm
6 bootfs pool property
7 Separate intent log devices
8 Delegated administration
9 refquota and refreservation properties
10 Cache devices
11 Improved scrub performance
12 Snapshot properties
13 snapused property
14 passthrough-x aclinherit support
For more information on a particular version, including supported releases, see:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/version/N
Where ‘N’ is the version number.
ZFS will be optional on server, so it will up to each admin to decide to use it or not…
This is just my guess…
As for ZFS on 10.7, I wouldn’t hold my breath that it would be the main OS, but maybe…
@ Printer manufacturers:
Why do “modern” printer drivers take up gigabytes?
The Imagewriter II driver (still usable in Mac OS 9) was IIRC 40KB!
The Laserwriter driver was (not quite sure) ~300KB!
If only the part of CUPS (now Apple owned/developed) that uses PPDs (would this be the front end, back end or ?) was supplied with manufacturer provided PPDs, the download sizes would drop. And that should improve printer compatibility with other (Linux/BSD) CUPS implementations as well. Or am I missing something?
/rant
Edited 2009-02-11 07:40 UTC
Because they load their drivers with lots of crap that no one needs.
Around 6 months ago, I installed an HP printer on my brother’s laptop and was quite impressed by the amount of services that get installed.
Lots of stupid process to start whatever dialog when the user clicks on the printer control buttons.
Sounds more like some strategical move for me. Maybe Apple prepares to lose their monopoly on OS installation (see PsyStar, PearC) and use online on-demand services as argument to bind OS X users to Apple hardware? For example to provide access to such services only to Apple hardware users? I mean, c’mon, it’s rediculous! How about not installing drivers by default but leaving them on the installation dvd so you can install’em any time later if you need it?
That’s exactly what happens in SL -> printer drivers are still on the disc. Just you can now download updates from Software Update.
> …printer drivers are still on the disc
Sure about that? Article says nothing about it and OSAlert description states something else: “…printer drivers on Snow Leopard will be delivered on demand, shaving off a few gigabytes of space off a default Mac OS X installation. The drivers will be obtained via Software Update if necessary.”
Finally the 1-2GB of printer drivers are no longer installed by default. It made no sense to have them there by default since they could always be fetched from software updates and adding new printers isn’t really an every-day task…