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macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

eclecticlight.co

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Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#21
post #10

Nice. But I would like it better if the effort was to support ext4, BtrFS, NTFS and other popular filesystems from the Linux and Windows world...

This article describes a new disk image format (on which a filesystem can be put, APFS in the article), not a filesystem, or did I misunderstand? edit: added the word "image", which I apparently forgot to type. Mentioning the edition because otherwise it would make an answer to this comment difficult to understand.

This is a new disk image format. Not even a disk format. For virtualizing a disk.

On which you can put a filesystem, yes.

There seems to be an extraordinary amount of confusion in many of the comments, I don't know why.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#22
It's a shame that every new cool product/dataformat/cable/cpu/whatever researched by Apple has very little (or no) public documentation. Sure, there are lots of hackers who can test and reverse engineer those pretty quickly, but it's just unnecessary work. I don't know why Apple is so revered in hacker circles, to be honest. Not even Microsoft does this shit anymore, they're open sourcing a lot of research this decade, but they're still seen with extreme distrust. Whereas Apple was always secretive and used underhanded tactics, but it is still loved.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#24
post #7

Nice. But I would like it better if the effort was to support ext4, BtrFS, NTFS and other popular filesystems from the Linux and Windows world...

Apple recently made FSKit a supported/documented API, which should allow third-parties to add support for other filesystems: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fskit?language=obj...

Is it actually supported and usable now? I seem to recall it spending a lot of time in a "half-documented and not actually available" state.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#26
post #7

Nice. But I would like it better if the effort was to support ext4, BtrFS, NTFS and other popular filesystems from the Linux and Windows world...

Apple recently made FSKit a supported/documented API, which should allow third-parties to add support for other filesystems: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fskit?language=obj...

3rd party supporting a file system would be one of the last things on a list of all software I’d ever want a 3rd party writing instead of the OS maker.

Nightmare to evaluate the options, pure stress testing the options, difficult to know if it didn’t mess something up.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#27
post #18
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if Mac also supported Linux file formats they would get closer to universal, though? we can't get to that world without these individual steps. creating a new non universal one is backing away from it

Does this even matter, if you can copy/mount files over a network? What are potential use cases where you'd want to support those additional file systems? External drives?

I just ran into a use case yesterday. I wanted to copy some files from either my Mac or my Windows machine onto the MicroSD card for my SteamDeck, which is ext4.

I wanted to just plug in the card and copy files, but couldn’t.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#28
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple recently made FSKit a supported/documented API, which should allow third-parties to add support for other filesystems: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fskit?language=obj...

3rd party supporting a file system would be one of the last things on a list of all software I’d ever want a 3rd party writing instead of the OS maker. Nightmare to evaluate the options, pure stress testing the options, difficult to know if it didn’t mess something up.

Question, who maintains NTFS support for Linux? Microsoft? The kernel? The distros? Genuinely asking.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#29
post #3

My favourite blog specifically for the painting articles

They are amazing, for sure.

Yes! So glad GP brought that up. Bookmarked, looking fwd to spending more time absorbing the fantastic images and accompanying texts.
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