ZFS flavor of the month

A week after Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz commented that ZFS would be in Leopard, an Apple executive said, "ZFS is not happening", when questioned about ZFS's inclusion in Leopard. Without ZFS announcement in the Apple WWDC, Mac developers would be disappointed and some reporters said they felt sleepy during the keynote.

(Update : Apple has denied the executive's claims and is clarifying that ZFS will be available as a limited option in OS X. See comments on the original story for details.)

ZFS seems to be flavor of the month. While many were expecting Apple to announce it was adding ZFS to Mac OS X, it doesn't seem likely after reading the Apple executive's comment. At least not in the forthcoming release.

In other news, ZFS was reviewed very positively in an InfoWorld article. The editor reviewing the ZFS was all praise for it. "It’s not every day that the computer industry delivers the level of innovation found in Sun's ZFS. More and more advances in the science of IT are based on simply multiplying the status quo. ZFS breaks all the rules here, and it arrives in an amazingly well-thought-out and nicely implemented solution."
Ok that makes up for "late by a year review." One thing that I've observed is that though Sun says ZFS doesn't stand for Zettabyte File System anymore, most reporters still make it a point to expand ZFS that way.

Then, eWEEK gave an Excellence award to ZFS in the E-Business Foundations category. ZFS deserves many such awards and kudos. It has made a big difference in the world of File systems.

ZFS in Mac OS X ?

Seems it wasn't just a rumour. ZFS is going to be in the upcoming MacOS X! Very cool to know ZFS is being ported to other OSs. It is already being ported to FreeBSD, along with DTrace. Porting ZFS to other OS is good for them as well as Solaris and Operating systems in general. It gives more visibility to such great technologies and innovation that they rightly deserve. It also gets other OS users to experience and use such powerful stuff. That would definitely attract more users to Solaris also, mainly those who still have to know how different Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris are to prior releases, and their capabilities.
The story and screenshot of ZFS in OS X was first broken here:
http://mac4ever.com/news/27485/zettabyte_sur_leopard/

Some blogs discussing it are at:
http://loop.worldofapple.com/archives/2006/12/17/zfs-file-system-makes-it-to-mac-os-x-leopard/
http://rom.feria.name/blog/2006/12/17/zfs-on-mac-os-x-105/
http://colindw.blogspot.com/2006/12/w00t-zfs-on-leopard.html
http://www.c0t0d0s0.eu/archives/2406-Its-official-ZFS-in-Leopard.html

MacOS X and Linux expert views , anyone

I must confess I haven't touched Linux for a long time now. The last time I seriously worked on it was RedHat 7.2 Linux which I used to learn MPI during my masters. I know it definitely has progressed a lot in the last few yrs. So, what are the new features added to the kernel or the distributions since then. I can't seem to remember any apart from some filesystems and lots of drivers.
Newer version of MacOS X will have X-Ray technology which is nothing but DTrace with a nice GUI on top.
If you know of some good features that are in Linux now, especially which are as revolutionary as the ones in Solaris ( see my last post) and are not available elsewhere, please leave a comment. I might try a new distro sometime soon.
Xen, I think would be a cool addition, but it is not unique for Linux. It will be very interesting to work with, though.

Best Operating System for geeks?

Most wannabe geeks would say Linux, though it is just a kernel and not an OS. Some would answer Ubuntu or Gentoo depending on which is the 'in thing'. A few people would perhaps say MacOS X is the best. Windows, of course, is not the one geeks want to be associated with.

One more OS is making waves in the academia and business world and with serious geeks for the last yr or so, after it was open sourced. For all the right reasons. That is the grand daddy of all, the most popular Unix - Solaris OS. No other operating system, not even Linux can claim to have as much geeky meat as Solaris. Some of the mouth watering stuff in Solaris 10, especially for geeks include:

Zones - software virtualization feature which has no match in any other OS. I can't remember which technology in any other OS comes even close. BSD jails, perhaps.

ZFS - the ultra modern file system, again with no match. The only thing that comes close is VxFS but ZFS is free with source code in the open.

DTrace - again no match anywhere. The capability to look into each and every place into the kernel and other parts in a running system using DTrace is unparalleled. It has been winning accolades all over. SystemTap for Linux is still not complete and its design makes it unlikely to be able to compete with DTrace in the future.

BrandZ - It gives you the capability to run Linux apps on top of Solaris. For example, you can run a version of Linux like CentOS right inside a Solaris Zone. Say you want to play Quake or use Google Earth which don't have Solaris apps; just create a Zone in Solaris, install your Linux in the zone and play away with the apps which are available in Linux. How more geeky can one get!

Of course, serious business won't play games. For them there are other more serious features like:
Fault Management Architecture (FMA), Service Management Framework(SMF), etc.

Linux is a good Operating System and has the advantage of having more drivers. But in almost everything else, Solaris scores higher. Now that it is open sourced it should get people interested in creating drivers. The community and codebase of Solaris is called OpenSolaris. Looking at the number of posts and projects there, it really looks like a dynamic and vibrant group of geeks.