Apple File System • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple File System

#131

Post by derefr » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 8:58 PM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #105

amock wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really a useful statement. HFS+ has worked pretty well for many years and is really well tested. This will be a completely new filesystem, which means it will have lots of new code that can have bugs or incompatibilities with current apps. APFS sounds like it's going to be great, but I think not being HFS is a disadvantage rather than an advantage.

> HFS+ has worked pretty well for many years and is really well tested Nope. HFS+ is REALLY GOOD at losing data or having silent corruption. I'm thrilled to have a new filesystem just because it's not HFS based. I'd celebrate having NTFS as the official filesystem. It's much more modern than HFS+.

Now you've got me wondering what would be required to convince the OSX kernel to boot from an NTFS-formatted volume. It certainly has the drivers (even if they're normally set to only mount NTFS volumes read-only.)

Re: Apple File System

#132

Post by regularfry » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 8:59 PM UTC

duskwuff wrote: post #118

regularfry wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's only got to beat FAT. That's a pretty low bar.

Re: Apple File System

#133

Post by ryao » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 9:04 PM UTC

legulere wrote: post #64

cpr wrote: post #2

Siracusa will finally be happy. ;-) Sounds an awful like like ZFS (zero-cost clones, read-only snapshots) but could it be? I would imagine they'd start from scratch to due IP issues. Clearly this is immature technology they want to get out for testing/evaluation before it's fully adopted even into their own products. (See below.) - - - from the release notes - - - As a developer preview of this technology, there are…

Another reason is that ZFS just isn't fitting for Apple devices. It's memory hungry and energy hungry and has several limitations compared to HFS+ like not being able to be resized.

ZFS will be happy on a system with only 512MB of RAM, no matter how much storage it manages (assuming only 1 pool). It does need more RAM than UFS, but the amount is not notable unless we are talking about systems with 32MB of RAM.

Being energy hungry relative to UFS and others is likely true due to things like checksum calculations and compression, but there is no way to implement these things without needing more cycles to compute them.

Re: Apple File System

#134

Post by pwthornton » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 9:07 PM UTC

drinchev wrote: post #23

This should've been in the keynote.

My No. 1 guess as to why it wasn't in the keynote was that Apple isn't sure when this will ship. I think they are hoping for a year from now, but a new filesystem is hard to pin down.

Re: Apple File System

#135

Post by majewsky » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 9:07 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #112

quantumhobbit wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

/boot on FAT32 is mostly an artifact of UEFI these days. When I set up BIOS-based systems, I usually had /boot on ext2.

Re: Apple File System

#136

Post by ryao » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 9:07 PM UTC

baldfat wrote: post #92

cjbprime wrote: post #22

I hope they don't patent it and go after Linux implementations, as Microsoft did with exfat.

Well the issue was that was a closed file system owned by Microsoft and used on Linux for Flash Drives and SD Cards. If you sue closed technology you get burned. I didn't have a problem with Microsoft doing what they did. We should have used an open file system for those devices. I personally have used ext2/rfs on my drives and it is a pretty light security system ;)

I would expect Apple's driver to be open source, so someone could just port it. Their HFS+ driver is open source.

Re: Apple File System

#137

Post by cpr » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 9:08 PM UTC

pducks32 wrote: post #116

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.

They simply started from scratch with an aim to

* best support modern hardware technologies,

* start from the state of the art in file systems (like ZFS and btrfs, old as they may be), and also

* emphasize security.

Re: Apple File System

#138

Post by coldtea » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 9:08 PM UTC

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.

Those limitations are obviously because it's in development.

Re: Apple File System

#139

Post by ryao » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 9:09 PM UTC

amock wrote: post #94

tambourine_man wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HFS+ already supports compression and it says APFS would support nearly all of the features of HFS+ , so there's hope.

I had forgotten about that. I don't really know how HFS+ compression works, so I'll wait and see APFS turns out.

HFS+ uses zlib (gzip).

Re: Apple File System

#140

Post by wazoox » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 9:10 PM UTC

amock wrote: post #55

2bitencryption wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not HFS. That in itself is a pretty huge advantage.

That's not really a useful statement. HFS+ has worked pretty well for many years and is really well tested. This will be a completely new filesystem, which means it will have lots of new code that can have bugs or incompatibilities with current apps. APFS sounds like it's going to be great, but I think not being HFS is a disadvantage rather than an advantage.

Come on. HFS+ has been a shame for 15 years now. It's been the laughing stock of the filesystem community for ages. They got the developer of BeFS on board to patch the thing until it may apes a modern filesystem for a couple of days at a time, and that's about it. It deserves to die an ugly death, strangled in a back alley without mercy. It's about as good as LINDOS/FAT32.

God, what a relief, we're almost done with this monstrosity of HFS+. Didn't you hear the collective sigh of anyone having to _work_ with this flea-market antique FS?