171–180 of 406 posts
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.
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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.
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…
Just saw a comment in another thread, stating Apple had slipped in improving their Unix layer, and here comes this. New file system is not a joking matter: Microsoft failed to deliver their new FS; Linux took years to go from ext2 to ext3 to ext4, and btrfs is in forever testing; most of *BSD still use their old ones; zfs took decade to become mainstream... The information currently is very scarce on this one, but I…
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I can see why there would be conflicts going case sensitive -> case insensitive, but I can't see why there would be conflicts going the other way. Am I missing something?
I think you have it backwards. If you try to expand an archive with FOO.TXT and foo.txt, what should happen if you're writing to a case insensitive file system? $ touch HI $ touch hi $ ls HI So that's disturbing. Another problem is every software you can think of will be comparing two files case insensitively. Almost weekly I get burned by this. $ touch HI $ test -f hi && echo ok ok
> many case insensitive hard drives would be copied into new machines and there would be millions of conflicts
I still don't see where you get a conflict copying the contents of a case-insensitive file system to a case-sensitive one.
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Copy-on-write and snapshots are excellent building blocks for Time Machine, so much in fact that, when it was announced, I suspected it was because of ZFS (which, at the time, was being considered for OSX). It's very likely TM will be adapted to work on it (with about 20 lines of code)
I'm not sure about snapshots, TM is made to work by just copying the directory structure over, and each backup is a fully functioning hierarchy. But cloning is definitely a big deal.
As I recall, HFS+ was explicitly modified to support directory hard links, which is less common in the Unix world, explicitly to support this feature.
TM also maintains a folder called /.MobileBackups to store temporary backups while your backup drive isn't connected. OS X also maintains /.fseventsd, a log of file system operations that TM can use to perform the next incremental, instead of having to compare each file for modifications.
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ZFS needs very little memory to run. Performance is definitely better with more RAM, but the overwhelming use of memory in ZFS is for cache. Eviction is not particularly efficient due to the cache being allocated from the SLAB allocator, but that is changing later this year. Getting ZFS to run on the Apple Watch is definitely possible. I am not sure what acceptably means here. It is an ambiguous term.
The FreeBSD wiki ( https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide ) still claims: > To use ZFS, at least 1 GB of memory is recommended (for all architectures) but more is helpful as ZFS needs lots of memory. Is that inaccurate?
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.
It's apple reinventing the zfs and btrfs wheels. Which are already mature, useable and open source. Google them and see what they do well, and you might get some ideas.
> 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…
> 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…