I don’t think this is an area where it makes sense to swim against the tide. Perhaps it will make changes to ZFS and try to get them into the official version. I have no inside information, but my guess is that Apple will eventually ship Macs that boot from some version of ZFS.
Or it could use another filesystem entirely. It could use ZFS or its own customized version of ZFS. So what’s the way forward? Apple could stick with the current HFS+ or try to add more features to it. Of course, I hope that Apple will start using extended attributes more, and if they do that could become a problem with ZFS.
Openzfs vs maczfs software#
This wouldn’t be perfect, but I think it could be “good enough.” (The current situation isn’t perfect, either relying on the filesystem’s case folding means that some software won’t work properly on UFS or HFSX.) Apple to date hasn’t shown much interest in using extended attributes, so I think MacJournals’ concerns about increased space consumption under ZFS are overblown. Thaler thinks the filesystem should be case-sensitive and the insensitivity should be layered on top by the application frameworks. It has inefficient storage for certain extended attributes. It’s case-sensitive rather than case-insensitive/case-preserving. The problem is that, as MacJournals explains, ZFS (as it currently stands) can’t be a drop-in replacement for HFS+. And, personally, I think snapshots and pools will be relevant to consumers sooner than people think. There are still data integrity features that could benefit everyone, as I was reminded this weekend when I had problems with the catalogs of two HFS+ drives. Some features like snapshots and merging multiple drives into a storage pool may not make sense for all consumers, especially on notebooks, but there’s no requirement that they be used.
Openzfs vs maczfs mac os x#
ZFS isn’t ready to be the default Mac OS X filesystem today, but HFS+ is or soon will be a liability, and ZFS is perhaps the best candidate for its eventual replacement. It’s going to be woefully inadequate real soon now. HFS+ is “not that bad” for today’s needs. If you’re an OS engineer and you aren’t hard at work solving the problems intrinsic to that TODAY, you’re not doing your job. My opinion is pretty well summed up by Thaler’s statement in the comments: And now MacJournals has responded to Thaler, saying “You don’t have to hate ZFS to know it’s wrong for you.” MacJournals responded with snark, which was not appreciated by Drew Thaler, a former Apple filesystems engineer. (It was the Attitudinal, after all.) A few days ago, AppleInsider wrote a fairly typical rumors article about ZFS and Leopard. Amid solid points about areas where ZFS falls short compared to HFS+ was much sneering at “command-line-addled ‘everything invented by Apple must be evil’ true believers” who want Apple to switch to ZFS. Back in June, MacJournals wrote a 13,000-word article that explained some of the virtues of ZFS and gleefully debunked the (crazy) rumor that it was to be the default file system in Leopard.
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