If true, this is great news!

Apple must have piled on the engineers to sort out a boot solution.

It may have been a premeditated outburst or a sudden slip-of-the-lip, but either way Sun Microsystems chief executive Jonathan Schwartz is claiming that Apple next week will announce a plan to replace the default Mac OS X file system with the Sun-developed ZFS.

Schwartz made the plans public while speaking to analysts and members of the media at a company event in nation's capital on Wednesday. The event was primarily aimed at hyping a more flexible array of blade servers.

"In fact, this week you'll see that Apple is announcing at their Worldwide Developer Conference that ZFS has become the file system in Mac OS 10," he said while speaking of his firm's file system (Real Player video link).

Originally conceived by Sun as a foundation for its Solaris operating system, ZFS features high capacity, a novel on-disk structure, lightweight instances, and the integration of the concepts for volume management.

Unlike a traditional file system, which resides on a single device and thus requires a volume manager to use more than one device, ZFS is built on top of virtual storage pools called zpools. A pool is constructed from virtual devices, each of which is either a raw device, a mirror of one or more devices, or a RAID-Z group of two or more devices.

ZFS would replace Apple's current default file system, Journaled HFS+, beginning with October's release of Leopard, according to Schwartz' comments.

Hmm. What are the implications of this. Will files be compatible with previous versions of Mac OS X. Will there be a choice as there is now when you format. What benefits does this bring.

I've heared ZFS is great, so it looks great. They'll probably include ZFS support in 10.4.10 once they've actually announced this themselves, and hopefully it'll be backwards compatible in some ways... we hope.

If it isn't going to be compatible, then it'll suck. Otherwise, all is well, no?

-tj

why release new hardware (MB/MBPs) and render their systems incompatible only days/months later?

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet

That likely means that Time Machine is going to be based on ZFS snapshots rather than Journaled HFS+

Sun's Schwartz made a boo boo by spilling the beans but ZFS isn't going to be a Top Secret Leopard feature. It's already known that ZFS support was in the betas albeit non bootable.