#Openzfs conference mac os x#
#Openzfs conference mac os#

#Openzfs conference mac os#

'In fact, this week you'll see that Apple is announcing at Worldwide Developer Conference that ZFS has become the file system in Mac OS 10,' mused Jonathan at a press event, apparently in an attempt to bolster Sun's own credibility. Only one person at Steve Jobs' company announces new products: Steve Jobs. Schwartz, brought into the loop either out of courtesy or legal necessity, violated the cardinal rule of the Steve Jobs-era Apple. It was planning on mentioning it at the upcoming WWDC. Apple had been working on a port of ZFS to Mac OS X. But while energizing Mac/ZFS fans, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz clumsily disrupted the momentum ZFS had been gathering in Apple's walled garden.

#Openzfs conference mac os x#

ZFS was to bring to Mac OS X data integrity, compression, checksums, redundancy, snapshots, and more. When's the last time you backed up your Mac? I'm backing up right now, just like I do every time I think about the neglectful stewardship of HFS+. Pray that your old photos are still intact. Bugs, power failures, and expected and inevitable media failures all mean that data is silently altered. Even in its most modern form, HFS+ lacks basic functionality around data integrity. That filesystem has limped along for more than 30 years-nudging forward, being rewritten to avoid in-kernel Pascal code (though retaining Pascal-style, length-prefixed strings) but never fully reimagined or reinvented. Not that there were many to organize on those 400K floppies, but progress is progress. HFS improved upon the Macintosh File System by adding-wait for it-hierarchy! No longer would files accumulate in a single pile you could organize them in folders. HFS was introduced in System 2.1 ('System' being what we called 'Mac OS' in the days before operating systems gained their broad and ubiquitous sex appeal). It was actually going to happen! Beyond the snapshots that would make backups a cinch, ZFS would dramatically advance the state of data storage for Apple users. Apple really was going to port ZFS to Mac OS X. 2007: Not so fastĪ few weeks before WWDC 2007, nerds like me started to lose their minds. So there was no ZFS in Mac OS X, at least not yet. For those who don't know a symlink from a symtab, this is the equivalent of using newspaper as insulation: it's fine until the completely anticipated calamity destroys everything you hold dear. With shame in his voice he admitted that it was really just a bunch of hard links to directories. After the keynote we rushed to an Apple engineer we knew.

Of course, Time Machine had nothing to do with ZFS. Time Machine! Not quite as magic as it seemed at first blush.