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

381–390 of 406 posts

Re: Apple File System

#381

Post by cmurf »

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…

Linux /boot tends to be on ext3 or ext4 on most distributions. Recently it's XFS on the server flavor of Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL. For openSUSE the default is Btrfs, /boot is just a directory.

The bootloader/bootmanager is what determines what fs choices you have for /boot. GRUB2 reads anything, including ZFS, Btrfs, LUKS, even md/mdadm raid5/6 and even if it's degraded, and conventional LVM (not thinp stuff or the md raid support).

Re: Apple File System

#382

Post by dang »

mpweiher wrote: post #344
dang wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't. Comments like this make the discussion quite a bit worse in their own right. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11897039 and marked it off-topic.

Former Apple engineer here. Yes, it sounds snide on the surface, but there is a lot of truth to it. I actually remember those of us on the inside being rather a- and bemused by the "magic" qualities we and our output had suddenly acquired.

The trouble with snidely expressed truth is that the snideness ends up dominating the discussion more than the truth does, and these effects compound over time. Therefore it's important to focus on simply expressing the truth as one understands it, as indeed you did in your comment here.

This is one point where the discourse on a large internet forum differs from that of smaller, more cohesive groups. We have to be vigilant about this on HN because we're more vulnerable to those compounding effects. The discussion doesn't naturally right itself and return to interesting things.

Re: Apple File System

#383

Post by cmurf »

entee wrote: post #60
imglorp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will they deploy it case insensitive, still?

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.

The fs should be case sensitive. If they want to enforce insensitivity it should be done with APIs for programs including the Finder.

Re: Apple File System

#384

Post by cmurf »

MBCook wrote: post #103
tdicola wrote: post #74

I'm going to be very cynical and say that based on their track record of major OS overhauls I am _not_ looking forward to the bugs and issues that will sneak past their QA. I still have nightmares of all the bugs with their wifi & USB stack changes in the last couple OSX releases. Please Apple, for your own good don't 'move fast and break things' with the filesystem. At the very least it's time for everyone to make s…

Compared to how risky and problematic HFS+ is? It may still be better.

Exchanging problems you know for problems you don't know.

Re: Apple File System

#386

Post by rdsnsca »

0x0 wrote: post #229

Hopefully this will be the end of .DS_Store and the crazy unicode normalization issue that causes mixups when rsync-roundtripping a directory structure between ext4 and HFS! :)

Doubt that. .DS_Store are created by the Finder.... not the file system.

Re: Apple File System

#387

Post by cmurf »

kchoudhu wrote: post #234
skrause wrote: post #19

No checksumming?

Can you implement COW filesystems without some kind of checksumming? Or have I been in ZFS-land for too long?

Yes, what's more difficult is implementing data checksumming without CoW. What you may not be used to in ZFS is a nodatacow option (per file or per filesystem) which does exist on Btrfs and it implies nodatasum (no checksums for data, metadata is still always checksummed and cow). Conversely, nodatasum does not imply nodatacow.

Re: Apple File System

#388

Post by cmurf »

duskwuff wrote: post #120
ptx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neither the format nor implementation of Core Storage is documented by Apple. Near as I can tell not even an fs magic number is documented, i.e an offset and a signature that makes it possible to identify Core Storage physical volumes.

Re: Apple File System

#389

Post by saithier »

watersb wrote: post #189
ahl wrote: post #161

The spartan description of APFS certainly sounds like the (partial) feature list for ZFS--the comparisons made in the comments here are on-point. ZFS though took around 5 years to ship and, arguably, another 5-10 to get right. I say this having shipped multiple products based on ZFS, writing code in ZFS, and diagnosing production problems with it. On-disk consistency ("crash protection"), snapshots, encryption, and t…

Yes. I was a heavy user of ZFS on Mac OS X back then. Was on the developer mailing list for that implentation, submitting bugs and talking to Apple developers working like mad to ship it. Then Steve Jobs' buddy Larry bought Sun, and licensing of ZFS became basically impossible to sort out on time. So they dropped it. Was that 2007 or 2009?

The thing that killed ZFS on the Mac was the NetApp lawsuit over it against Sun.

Re: Apple File System

#390

Post by 0x0 »

rdsnsca wrote: post #386
0x0 wrote: post #229

Hopefully this will be the end of .DS_Store and the crazy unicode normalization issue that causes mixups when rsync-roundtripping a directory structure between ext4 and HFS! :)

Doubt that. .DS_Store are created by the Finder.... not the file system.

Maybe Finder could stash that stuff elsewhere if the new file system accomodates metadata on directories, or such.
Post reply on HN