That strikes me as mostly beyond the realm of possibility. APFS development quite clearly started much later—for example, it's intrinsically designed to target modern SSDs. It could be some other custom Apple filesystem project, but I doubt it has any relation to what became APFS.
That’s fair. I’m speculating.
In addition to your other theories, I wonder if this could be some type of ZFS fork? Apple could have still been experimenting with adopting pieces of it.
I doubt it.
Given the internal fuss (some reports seemed to describe it as fury) which Jobs made over being
scooped by a Sun executive for announcing an Apple adoption and move to ZFS just days prior to his WWDC keynote
in 2008 in 2007
announcing Snow Leopard (and Apple subsequently backing away from continuing ZFS
support and development for what was to be called “AppleZFS”), between that scoop and Apple’s ZFS final implementation update — still incomplete — in March 2009 (with
Build 10A286), it seems contradictory Apple chose to rely on ZFS technology internally (and, thus, continued licensing) any further beyond that point.
Indeed, Apple’s ZFS development was halted many months (eight, if we’re relying on when that PVT iMac in the above YT clip was built for Apple) prior to when the hardware-specific build of a post-Golden Master Snow Leopard 10.6.0 (accessible by the YT poster) was installed on that iMac.
I’m tending to guess Apple KFS was not terribly dissimilar to what that YT poster found in the IRIX documentation — namely, that KFS is a network storage-based file system, not terribly dissimilar from something like NFS.
EDIT to add: Whatever the case, the genesis of there even being an APFS now arises from that
abrupt course change from Apple’s original plans for widespread adoption of ZFS, as APFS later set out to do
much of what ZFS had delivered well beforehand.
SECOND EDIT: Made some temporal corrections and added another reference link, as noted by the strikeouts. My bad.
THIRD EDIT (on KFS): Although nowhere near a certainty, I keep running across an open source file system, contemporary to when this iMac was configured, called the Kosmos File System — a distributed file system intended for use in “write infrequently/read many” settings of,
inter alia, search engine back-ends and also grid computing.
An
overview from 2007, the year it was released, describes this type of file system as one which relies on “chunks” of a file being stored across several nodes within a KFS logical volume (compared with, say, XFS having chunks, but all of it stored on one physical volume, or node). Each node serving a KFS volume is a system configured to host/serve chunks of a file on a KFS-formatted “disk” whose contents exist across a logical
networked/distributed volume (e.g., an iMac as a node server within a major internal network). This distributed chunk writing across many nodes allows for
up to 64 mirrored chunks to exist within that logical volume as redundant fallbacks. This allows a user who needs to access a file to be able to do so, even if a chunk containing some of that file’s data becomes unavailable should a node within the KFS volume be down (like when a server node/computer is taken offline). All of this happens transparently and is invisible to the end user, who merely grabs the needed file from the KFS-formatted volume as if the file was hosted locally. The read speeds would be lightning fast; the write speeds would be a lot slower.
In an internal setting, such as Apple’s corporate offices, a KFS server node might be any single networked Mac (or any networked hardware within a domain which configured as a KFS server node); having tens, if not hundreds of Macs connected as server nodes for a KFS volume would make any
file writes for a shared use to be uniform for any client needing access to that volume’s files or their contents (and for the data in those files to have plenty of redundancy in the process). What comes to mind is help/technical documentation, Xgrid computing, or even core read-only files of an OS, accessible simultaneously to many clients at any given moment.
Anyway, that’s the only guess I have at this point.
