Is there any reason to use APFS on desktop?
My hope is that it will improve Time Machine performance / reliability.
APFS filesystem format
31–40 of 148 posts
Re: APFS filesystem format
#32Timestamps are 64bit nanoseconds As far as I can tell, this will overflow in just 11 years – 2028-06-15 09:33:27.3709551615 UTC Why would this go into a new standard? Is there a practical use for such a high level of granularity? edit: off by a factor of 10 in my calculation... It's actually 2554-07-21 23:34:33.709551615 UTC
2^64 nanoseconds is > 580 years. Even cutting it in half for signed values is still likely 10X the expected lifetime of this particular iteration of APFS. The granularity is probably useful for establishing an ordering (even somewhat arbitrarily) for highly concurrent file system operations, and thus potentially skipping a bunch of expensive synchronization.
As mentioned in the article, they are unsigned 64bit integers though.
Re: APFS filesystem format
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
They never promised to open up iMessage. The story behind FaceTime is a little bit more complicated. Steve Jobs said he would open it up without asking the engineers and lawyers who were just as surprised as anyone else about his announcement. As far as Apple not open sourcing anything. https://opensource.apple.com They also published the full git commit history of Swift from the initial commit.
Open sourcing Swift, though, probably benefits Apple more than it does the community. Sans the Apple UI, it doesn't create some opportunity to lose a sale or have Apple like consumer facing apps show up on some other platform. Apple apps already mostly rely on non-apple backend servers. Opening up iMessage or FaceTime would have been more of a statement. Either would allow interoperability on platforms they don't con…
WebKit? Darwin? ResearchKit?
Apple gets this bad rap for OSS, because of Google's good PR a few years back on how "Android was open." But it's not like Google has a better track record of supporting OSS when it comes to products that influence their bottom line. Adwords, Google Search, AdSense, Analytics, etc are not open source, and no one ever complains about that.
Re: APFS filesystem format
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open sourcing Swift, though, probably benefits Apple more than it does the community. Sans the Apple UI, it doesn't create some opportunity to lose a sale or have Apple like consumer facing apps show up on some other platform. Apple apps already mostly rely on non-apple backend servers. Opening up iMessage or FaceTime would have been more of a statement. Either would allow interoperability on platforms they don't con…
WebKit? Darwin? ResearchKit? Apple gets this bad rap for OSS, because of Google's good PR a few years back on how "Android was open." But it's not like Google has a better track record of supporting OSS when it comes to products that influence their bottom line. Adwords, Google Search, AdSense, Analytics, etc are not open source, and no one ever complains about that.
Those are good examples. It was an honest question though, not a proclamation that Apple hasn't open sourced anything.
Edit: Maybe Google is getting more credit because of uptake? Chromium, golang, protobufs, material design, etc. So perhaps not how much was open source, but how much of it ended up in non Google projects?
Re: APFS filesystem format
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open sourcing Swift, though, probably benefits Apple more than it does the community. Sans the Apple UI, it doesn't create some opportunity to lose a sale or have Apple like consumer facing apps show up on some other platform. Apple apps already mostly rely on non-apple backend servers. Opening up iMessage or FaceTime would have been more of a statement. Either would allow interoperability on platforms they don't con…
WebKit? Darwin? ResearchKit? Apple gets this bad rap for OSS, because of Google's good PR a few years back on how "Android was open." But it's not like Google has a better track record of supporting OSS when it comes to products that influence their bottom line. Adwords, Google Search, AdSense, Analytics, etc are not open source, and no one ever complains about that.
They didn't open WebKit. It's a fork of the LGPL'd KHTML code base. Apple is legally obliged to keep it open, so whatever anyone thinks about Apple's open source record using WebKit as an example makes little sense.
Re: APFS filesystem format
#36Is there any reason to use APFS on desktop?
There are a couple features missing from HFS+. Some of these are implemented in APFS: * Case sensitivity * Clones extents / ranges (reflinking) * Holes in the middle of files * ACLs * Collapsing file ranges * Per file compression and per file encryption These are useful for apps like SQLite or other stores which implement a multi user, log structured store.
Isn't there a flag to make hfs case sensitive? Programs react poorly because it's rare, but it's available.
Re: APFS filesystem format
#37Re: APFS filesystem format
#38Is there any reason to use APFS on desktop?
There are a couple features missing from HFS+. Some of these are implemented in APFS: * Case sensitivity * Clones extents / ranges (reflinking) * Holes in the middle of files * ACLs * Collapsing file ranges * Per file compression and per file encryption These are useful for apps like SQLite or other stores which implement a multi user, log structured store.
FYI - HFS is capability of case sensitivity and is an option during formatting. I believe it even used to be the default.
Re: APFS filesystem format
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
My hope is that it will improve Time Machine performance / reliability.
COW should do wonders for performance, but COW with no data checksums would make me more nervous about reliability (only one copy of files to corrupt)
I agree to a point, one factor that can help mitigate this however is using a quality SSD where it's onboard memory has ECC, I suspect Apple sees the near future of end user computing as gaining ECC for all memory by standard which is something I've wanting for years but games have been played by CPU manufacturers to prevent the use of high end desktop CPUs in server environments by I believe purposely kneecapping them from using ECC memory (citation probably needed here).
Re: APFS filesystem format
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open sourcing Swift, though, probably benefits Apple more than it does the community. Sans the Apple UI, it doesn't create some opportunity to lose a sale or have Apple like consumer facing apps show up on some other platform. Apple apps already mostly rely on non-apple backend servers. Opening up iMessage or FaceTime would have been more of a statement. Either would allow interoperability on platforms they don't con…
WebKit? Darwin? ResearchKit? Apple gets this bad rap for OSS, because of Google's good PR a few years back on how "Android was open." But it's not like Google has a better track record of supporting OSS when it comes to products that influence their bottom line. Adwords, Google Search, AdSense, Analytics, etc are not open source, and no one ever complains about that.
The big one is maps...though that's not so much open source as open data.