211–220 of 406 posts
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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?
Depends on your needs. Stability, reliability: ext4/XFS CoW, snapshots, multi-drive FS: ZFS/btrfs SSD speed, longevity: F2FS
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"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.
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Probably too technical for a typical keynote watcher
Typical World Wide Developer Conference watcher? If so, that's a shame!
Most people do seem to assume that the WWDC is an hour~ long commercial for everything Apple is going to do for the rest of the year.
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Will they deploy it case insensitive, still?
According to their documented "Current Limitations" ( https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/docum... ): > Case Sensitivity: Filenames are currently case-sensitive only. First thought: they have seen the light! A moment later: wait...they consider this a "limitation", and it's only "currently" the case. So maybe they're going to perpetuate the brain-damage anyway. Sigh.
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Control over hardware doesn't really buy you anything here. Just about any hardware can use any filesystem with, in the worst case, the requirement that you have a small boot partition using the legacy filesystem.
Interestingly with SSD storage devices, control of the hardware can help a lot more as it can become possible to categorize, fully explore and if needed, ensure a particular behavior of commands like TRIM. Other filesystems have the unenviable task of running on any random piece of storage you throw at it, including things where the firmware straight up lies, or the hardware delays non-volatility past the point the f…
It also doesn't help to control 100% of the built-in storage if anybody can still plug in $GENERIC_USB_MASS_STORAGE_DEVICE and expect to use the same filesystem.
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?
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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.
ZFS de-duplication will eat all of the RAM you can throw at it. Otherwise, it is basically the SLUB memory block allocator that was used in the Linux kernel for a while. So yes, it can run on watchOS-level amount of RAM.
No checksumming?
Checksumming makes no sense on modern hardware. Hard Drives and SSDs use CRCs already. When a sector goes bad on a hard drive, the firmware will mess about retrying and altering the analog amplifiers to try to get the signal back. If it gets the data back, it might "recover" by moving the data to spare sectors. Without a CRC, the firmware would have no way of differentiating between a sector read correctly and one th…
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Probably too technical for a typical keynote watcher
Typical World Wide Developer Conference watcher? If so, that's a shame!
While I am happy that Apple have at last committed to replacing HFS+, I'm wondering why they didn't use ZFS rather than reinventing the wheel. It's not like it's a particularly easy wheel to reinvent either; the amount of effort which goes into a filesystem like ZFS is non-trivial. Why not build on top of that? I would have greatly appreciated being able to use ZFS with MacOS X, for datasets, snapshots, sending them…
There's also a decent chunk of what ZFS supports (particularly flexible volume pool management) that would be useless on almost every machine that Apple makes and sells. Your example of pulling a drive out of one machine and putting it in another is either impossible (soldered-on storage) or highly unlikely (user-serviceable SSD, but hidden behind a bunch of pentalobe screws) with their modern hardware lineup.