Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple File System

developer.apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 406 posts

Re: Apple File System

#111

Post by MBCook »

wrigby wrote: post #37
zingplex wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like they promised to open source FaceTime and iMessages? Apple has a history of making false promises in regards to open sourcing products.

My understanding was that FaceTime and iMessage weren't open sourced because of issues related to a patent troll (VirnetX IIRC). I'd be interested in hearing from others that are more familiar with the situation.

Not only that, but apparently Steve Jobs decided to just say that on stage and while it had been discussed a bit it wasn't the plan and came as a total shock to the people involved.

Re: Apple File System

#112

Post by derefr »

quantumhobbit wrote: post #10
xd1936 wrote: post #5

> It is optimized for Flash/SSD storage and features strong encryption, copy-on-write metadata, space sharing, cloning for files and directories, snapshots, fast directory sizing, atomic safe-save primitives, and improved file system fundamentals. \o/ Hallelujah, something modern!

I was excited to until I read the limitations section. Can't be used as the startup disk and doesn't work with time machine. Hopefully this with change in the next macOs release.

"Can't be used as the startup disk" is not necessarily a strong limitation; with FileVault enabled, you start up from your Recovery partition anyway. Even if they lose FileVault, I would guess they'll keep the Recovery partition setup (since they've invested in it a bit as a pseudo-BIOS, for changing things like SIP.) So that image can stay HFS and hold your boot kernel, while "Macintosh HD" can just be APFS. Sort of like Linux with /boot on FAT32 and / in LVM.

Re: Apple File System

#113

Post by STRML »

MBCook wrote: post #102
jbergstroem wrote: post #30

No snapshotting yet, can't boot, no migration tools for existing setups (time machine, filevault, fusion). It'd be interesting to see whether their permission changes introduced in 10.11 will travel further down the fs. Also, I don't see any mention of compression like lz4. Lots of work until release in 2017!

Is compression really that big a deal any more?

While they're still shipping machines with < 1TB SSDs (read: for a long time), yes - why not take the relatively free space and I/O savings?

Re: Apple File System

#114

Post by wtetzner »

cuddlybacon wrote: post #84
entee wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably as with today, you'll have the option. I don't have a strong opinion on case sensitivity of file names, but I suspect they'll keep it case insensitive by default. I think for the average non-technical user that two files, "MyFile.txt" and "myfile.txt", being different could lead to some confusion, and Apple historically has apparently considered that confusion unacceptable.

Steam relies on the filesystem being insensitive.

Really? What filesystem do they use in SteamOS?

Re: Apple File System

#115

Post by duskwuff »

PinguTS wrote: post #75
killercup wrote: post #45

> Flash / SSD Optimization I.e., a "unique copy-on-write design" > Space Sharing Basically, ZFS datasets. > Snapshots If those can be sent: Finally Time Machine done right. > The AFP protocol is deprecated and cannot be used to share APFS formatted volumes. Interesting. > An open source implementation is not available at this time. Apple plans to document and publish the APFS volume format when Apple File System is r…

> The AFP protocol is deprecated and cannot be used to share APFS formatted volumes. Interesting. That is really interesting. I recognised with El Capitan that it already defaults to SMB instead of AFP when you don't give a scheme.

AFP depends on having persistent, globally addressable IDs for files (CNIDs). Perhaps this is no longer available under APFS?

While I imagine this might be retrofittable (netatalk manages it, after all), I can't blame Apple for wanting to ditch AFP. It's an ancient protocol at this point, and I'm frankly just amazed it still works at all.

Re: Apple File System

#116

Post by pducks32 »

I read the link and have a pretty good understanding about how computers and file systems work but can someone "explain like I'm a decently intelligent programmer" what is different about this file system? Thanks you.

Re: Apple File System

#117

Post by qmr »

dmix wrote: post #101
Analemma_ wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

btrfs was available in the Linux kernel in 2009, but didn't see production release in the tinkerer-friendly distros until 2012 and in an enterprise distro until 2015. These things take time: filesystems need to be absolutely bulletproof, especially in the consumer space where (unlike Linux) most users will have no idea what to do if something goes wrong. I'd say Microsoft is still on schedule.

Speaking of which, is there any other good FS to use for desktop Linux (on an SSD on ArchLinux) or is Ext4 still the recommended standard?

XFS, ZFS, btrfs

Re: Apple File System

#118

Post by duskwuff »

regularfry wrote: post #96
entee wrote: post #76

It would be really nice is there was a modern file system that "just worked" regardless of device. I'm tired of having exFAT/FAT being the only filesystem I can reliably use on multiple different OS-es painlessly, and even then I can't use it for all the functions of those OS-es (No time machine). Hopefully this will be open enough to enable that, though who knows how it will shake out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format ? That looked hopeful last I was juggling with this sort of thing, but that was long enough ago that WinXP support was the killer.

From what I understand, UDF is primarily targeted at one-time-recordable media. (It's used in DVDs, for example.) It's unclear how well it works for primary storage, but I suspect it's clumsy at best.

Re: Apple File System

#120

Post by duskwuff »

ptx wrote: post #42
jasonjei wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple says they intend to open-source the file system in the docs. Open Source : "An open source implementation is not available at this time. Apple plans to document and publish the APFS volume format when Apple File System is released in 2017."

It says they plan to document and publish the volume format but nothing about the source code of the implementation. It being "not available at this time" doesn't necessarily imply that it will be available in the future.

I'd imagine the implementation will show up in the next appropriate XNU kernel release.
Post reply on HN