Since there will be no new zfs version for Leopard (the apple developers decided not to split their work because they needed to do changes in the kernel) we were interested what the state of zfs in snow leopard is.

The latest beta version for leopard was 119. The version in snow leopard 10a222 was 130 and in 10a261 it is 145.

Version 119 still had several problems with unmounting volumes, deleting the trash and with spotlight. All these bugs were fixed in version 145.

There even is some support in Disk Utility now. You can’t create pools but you see the slices of the pool and the pool itself.

The internal zfs version still is 8 and every pool created has version 6. OpenSolaris is up to version 14.

Interestingly the zfs.kext is NOT made for PPC, but only for x86 and x86_64 while rest of the system is made for all three architectures.

And don’t get fooled by people saying zfs is not really useful for normal users. Even when you are not using raid/mirror features or snapshots you get a filesystem which tells you when there is corruption in your files and the filesystem itself never (at least that’s what they promise) gets corrupted. That alone makes me totally happy even if I personally will use all the other features too!

It seems that every news site speculates about the reasons for new leight weight Snow Leopard. I will list some:

1. No more PPC Code

All applications in Snow Leopard come as Universal Binaries. So does the kernel. Even if the “No more PPC code” rumor was true, it wouldn’t save enough to make Mail.app lose around 68% of 287MB. The Universal Binary only is 9.9MB in size. So even if the PPC code was 90%, it wouldn’t be enough to explain losing 196MB.

2. The “unneeded” language files are missing.

No, Snow Leopard still has all language files in their place.

3. Smaller Binaries.

Nothing has changed here. In fact, some apps have even bigger file sizes of the executable than before.

So, what has changed then? When you look in Mail.app you see that language files use up most of the disc space. Inside the language folder (e.g. “German.lproj”) are a lot of .nib files (the extension of Interface Builder). Inside normally are two files. One is a very small “keyedobjects.nib” and the other is very big “designable.nib” file.

When you open the Mail.app folder with “Show Package Contents”, navigating through the resources and open then a .nib file with Interface Builder you see everything the developer did when designing the application’s GUI. But all that changed with Snow Leopard. Now the “designable.nib” is gone. It seems like it had no reason other than to give hackers a chance to mess with the application’s UI design.