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macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

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Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#121

Post by mihaaly »

coldtea wrote: post #57
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. Given how many people use FUSE, Paragon NTFS for Mac, and similar tools, you're hardly totally representative.

They trust kernel extensions apparently, all of them.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#123

Post by mdaniel »

shakna wrote: post #112
mannyv wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take your kingdom! ISO 9660. https://www.iso.org/iso-9660-images-for-computer-files.html VMDK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMDK Amiga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Disk_File UDF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format Apple Disk Image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Disk_Image

VMDK isn't documented there, and is a container for multiple partially documented - and some only reverse engineered - subformats.

Not on wikipedia, but VMDK is part of the DTMF OVF[1] format and thus I believe the .vmdk format would be implicitly made available therein

However, words are words but software is better:

- https://github.com/vmware/open-vmdk#specifications is Apache 2

- the link they cited is bitrotten but Internet Archive has you: https://web.archive.org/web/20210411181842/https://www.vmwar...

1: https://www.dmtf.org/standards/ovf

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#124

Post by BenjiWiebe »

marwis wrote: post #81
dist-epoch wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft itself admits there are performance issues with NTFS, which is one reason they created ReFS. For example ReFS removed the MFT which caused various problems.

There are tools like voidtools Everything2 and WizTree that directly read NTFS from disk device bypassing windows FS apis and are blazingly fast (faster than find/du on ext4 in Linux).

'Everything' is caching all the files in memory and indexing them. Completely different than find/du on Linux.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#125

Post by 8fingerlouie »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #26
mrpippy wrote: 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.

What would Apple's incentive be to support Btrfs, Ext4, XFS or ZFS ?

Btrfs, Ext4 and XFS are all under GPLv3, which may or may not be a problem for Apple, but "just in case".

They tried with ZFS, but couldn't strike a deal with Sun/Oracle, so instead invented APFS.

Apple already delivers a stable filesystem. It may not be "best of breed", but it works, as billions of devices runs on it every day with zero problems.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#126

Post by JumpCrisscross »

reddalo wrote: post #114
skrtskrt wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is actually a human struggle - I add Conclusions to my blog posts / dev guides because it feels awkward to just end with the last step. But it also always feels like I am just awkwardly restating things I just said. It's not a thesis, an article generally not complicated enough to need a re-synthesizing of main points at the end.

I used to love em dashes. But now I can't use them anymore — people will think it's written by AI.

Take the space on either side away—it’s still grammatically correct, but the machines don’t like it.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#127

Post by tobias3 »

mannyv wrote: post #110
bigyabai wrote: post #2

My kingdom for a documented disk image format.

I'll take your kingdom! ISO 9660. https://www.iso.org/iso-9660-images-for-computer-files.html VMDK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMDK Amiga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Disk_File UDF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format Apple Disk Image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Disk_Image

VHDX https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocol...

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#128

Post by dwaite »

xp84 wrote: post #113
lucasoshiro wrote: post #4

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...

Does anybody else think that it would make sense for Apple and Microsoft to just get in a room and horse trade a few things like this, if they cared about user experience? Cross-license both APFS and NTFS, and share any internal documentation under NDA so that external drives can use modern formats with safety features like journaling without locking users in. Oh wait, I just answered my question.

I suspect there wouldn't be an agreement on a minimum set of features for a modern filesystem, even just for external disks, even if you limited it to flash storage devices to avoid all the complexities of spinning platter latency.

After all, there's no such agreement on Linux either - we just have all the Linux vendor options available.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#129

Post by dwaite »

bombcar wrote: post #90
mtillman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

correct. but it's also a management system so perhaps they only want a files system? no idea why more don't use zfs. especially after the auto expansion update earlier in the year.

Apple almost went with ZFS and Sun pissed off Jobs by mentioning it early (IIRC).

Not AFAICT.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17852019

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#130

Post by xp84 »

dwaite wrote: post #128
xp84 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anybody else think that it would make sense for Apple and Microsoft to just get in a room and horse trade a few things like this, if they cared about user experience? Cross-license both APFS and NTFS, and share any internal documentation under NDA so that external drives can use modern formats with safety features like journaling without locking users in. Oh wait, I just answered my question.

I suspect there wouldn't be an agreement on a minimum set of features for a modern filesystem, even just for external disks, even if you limited it to flash storage devices to avoid all the complexities of spinning platter latency. After all, there's no such agreement on Linux either - we just have all the Linux vendor options available.

Let me clarify, I don't expect two vendors like that to merge filesystem specs. I just think they should have first-class support for reading and writing on each others' default (NTFS and APFS) filesystems because the alternative is that a user who has a hard drive full of their important documents can't switch between Mac and PC without buying 100% more storage with which to do a complicated filesystem-migration exercise -- and let's be honest, only an absolute nerd (like us) would even understand what that is. Others would just plug in the NTFS disk to the Mac, see the popup saying "unreadable," shrug and give up (or worst case, format it not understanding that means erasing).

This is the kind of thing a reasonable government would just tell them they had to do by virtue of being a fully locked-in duopoly, just like they should tell Apple and Google that users should be able to choose to install an alternat app store.

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