I wanted to clarify the status of the ZFS file system and Leopard OS X.  The situation is explained in The Mac Observer post:

Apple’s revolving door on ZFS has spun back around again. Now the word out of Cupertino is that the ZFS file system will be included in Mac OS X 10.5, but in a limited capacity, according to InformationWeek.

Several days before the Steve Jobs keynote at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz claimed that Mac OS X 10.5, or Leopard, would include his company’s 128-bit ZFS file system. On keynote day, however, Mr. Jobs said nothing about ZFS.

Afterwards, Brian Croll, Apple’s senior director of product marketing for Mac OS, commented “ZFS is not happening.”

Later, an Apple spokesperson attempted to clarify Mr. Croll’s comments to InformationWeek by stating that ZFS actually will be included in Leopard, but only as a read-only option from the command line.

And finally, Mr. Croll added his own clarification to the spokesperson’s clarification. “ZFS is not the default file system for Leopard,” he said. “We are exploring it as a file system option for high-end storage systems with really large storage. As a result, we have included ZFS – a read-only copy of ZFS – in Leopard.”

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