On Aug 18, 2010, at 3:43 AM, Joerg Schilling wrote: > Gabriele Bulfon <gbul...@sonicle.com> wrote: > >> We should not forget that Larry & Steve are said to be old time friends. >> Apple showed great interest on ZFS (as any other OS vendor, be it interest >> or envy). Who knows what caused the decision to drop it? Maybe Steve was >> aware of next Solaris happenings? >> >> I see no other reason why any OS vendor would drop such an amazing >> technology. > > I've talked to a person who was invited by Apple to the private ZFS > demonstration some time ago. At that time, Mac OS X would immediately panic > once ZFS was mounted R/W. It is not a simple task, to include filesystem code > that was designed for a single-context kernel into a multi-context kernel OS > like Mac OS X. > > The other problem was that Apple wantet ZFS for free plus a legal > indemnification on patent lawsuits.
I'm also not so sure ZFS made that much sense for Apple. They sell some servers, but their target market is desktops and laptops. ZFS is great on a server, where you have multiple disks for redundancy and lots of RAM to satisfy ZFS's vast hunger for memory. On a single-disk laptop? Not so much. Remember, Apple still sells base systems with 2 GB of RAM. Even 4 GB is sometimes not sufficient to make ZFS happy, in my experience. (On one of my 4 GB fileservers ZFS would sometimes consume so much RAM that the ethernet driver couldn't allocate buffers.) I don't think ZFS was going to be a good end user experience on a typical Apple machine. -- David Brodbeck System Administrator, Linguistics University of Washington _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
