Once upon a time, Apple came very close to releasing ZFS as part of MacOS. Apple did this work in its own copy of the ZFS source base (as far as I know), but the people in Sun knew about it and it turns out that even today there is one little lingering sign of this hoped-for and perhaps prepared-for ZFS port in the ZFS source code. Well, sort of, because it's not quite in code.

Lurking in the function that reads ZFS directories to turn (ZFS) directory entries into the filesystem independent format that the kernel wants is the following comment:

objnum = ZFS_DIRENT_OBJ(zap.za_first_integer); /* * MacOS X can extract the object type here such as: * uint8_t type = ZFS_DIRENT_TYPE(zap.za_first_integer); */

(Specifically, this is in zfs_readdir in zfs_vnops.c .)

ZFS maintains file type information in directories. This information can't be used on Solaris (and thus Illumos), where the overall kernel doesn't have this in its filesystem independent directory entry format, but it could have been on MacOS ('Darwin'), because MacOS is among the Unixes that support d_type . The comment itself dates all the way back to this 2007 commit, which includes the change 'reserve bits in directory entry for file type', which created the whole setup for this.

I don't know if this file type support was added specifically to help out Apple's MacOS X port of ZFS, but it's certainly possible, and in 2007 it seems likely that this port was at least on the minds of ZFS developers. It's interesting but understandable that FreeBSD didn't seem to have influenced them in the same way, at least as far as comments in the source code go; this file type support is equally useful for FreeBSD, and the FreeBSD ZFS port dates to 2007 too (per this announcement).

Regardless of the exact reason that ZFS picked up maintaining file type information in directory entries, it's quite useful for people on both FreeBSD and Linux that it does so. File type information is useful for any number of things and ZFS filesystems can (and do) provide this information on those Unixes, which helps make ZFS feel like a truly first class filesystem, one that supports all of the expected general system features.