Well, the results are in and everyone predicting ZFS as the file system for the next version of Apple’s Mac OS X was only partially right. Turns out that ZFS won’t be the exclusive file system used in Leopard. Of course, this news has come by way of massive back and forth. Needless to say, there’s a lot of confusion about this story. Confusion is never a good thing. If you only wanted to read one article about the whole ordeal, this one summarizes everything pretty well.

Personally, I would be interested in using ZFS in two possible scenarios. The first would be on a Linux desktop / server, which is likely not going to happen because it is released in an incompatible license. To make a short story long: ZFS is released under the CDDL, which doesn’t really play nice with Linux, but there’s a movement to port ZFS to FUSE/Linux so that it runs in userspace under the CDDL. At best, it’s under investigation.

The other place where I would be interested in using ZFS is on a laptop. This is interesting because of the incremental remote backup facilities that it provides. I also like the built in compression features. However, I have to say that lack of file system encryption is probably a deal breaker for me on a laptop. It’s just too important to have on a laptop. There is a zfs-crypto project, but it’s still under development.

I know this was originally scoped out as a server file system, but I don’t understand why they didn’t want to include encryption at the file system level. There are certainly a lot of uses for file system level encryption in a server environment, not the least of which is to avoid the cloudy legal status of third party consent in computer searches. With an encrypted file system, you don’t have to worry about someone stealing your hard drive and using another tool to read it’s contents. Maybe I’m extremely biased, but it seems like any new file system that wants to take itself seriously at the server level and especially on laptops should be designed to at least allow encryption as an option.