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Apple abandons ZFS on Mac OS X project over licensing issues

// October 26th, 2009 // Tech News

Sun’s ZFS filesystem, which the company has referred to as “the last word in filesystems,” was widely expected to be adopted by Apple for use in Mac OS X. However, support never materialized, and the open source project to port the filesystem was unceremoniously shut down last Friday. The (un)stated reasons at heart seem to be licensing issues, though there are also technological reasons why Apple may want to create its own advanced filesystem. The ZFS filesystem is perhaps one of the first truly “modern” filesystems based on the concept of “copy on write.” This means that a fresh copy of all the data in a file is written to disk when saved, and the older copy is retained for some amount of time in case of write errors or other problems. The filesystem is meant to address the needs of ever-growing storage , with features like data integrity, integrated device management, instant snapshots, and facilities to deal with increasing concurrency.