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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

#131

Post by kccqzy »

archagon wrote: post #103
kccqzy wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why that would blow your mind, but Apple's old Time Capsule basically mounted a sparsebundle over the network too. And yes I would also guess this new format would work better.

My experience with NFS file management has been less than stellar, so running a full, virtualized, and performant APFS volume on top of it feels like a bit of a magic trick.

Interesting. My employer uses NFS extensively and issues are very rare, and such issues can always be traced to underlying network issues not NFS itself. It's a good choice if you have a good network.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#132

Post by kccqzy »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #54

Doesn’t sound particularly useful, if you aren’t setting up containers.

I use sparse disk images extensively as a tool to make certain directories require specific passwords. I simply create an encrypted sparse disk image and set a password on them. Seems like this will speed up my use case.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#133

Post by VonGallifrey »

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.

> Given how many people use

How many people use software like this because they have no choice? I used Paragon NTFS, but the entire time, I thought it was ridiculous that MacOS can't read NTFS on its own.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#134

Post by [deleted] »

frizlab wrote: post #52

I have a meta question not directly related to the article but more about HN itself. I posted this exact link 9h before this submission was posted[1]. How is it possible that there is a new entry for the submission given the link is the same? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=eclecticlight.co

[deleted]

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#136

Post by kccqzy »

zymhan wrote: post #120
kccqzy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and OP was asking, why was effort spent on a disk image format rather than a file system. Seems like a reasonable question to ask.

Not any more reasonable than asking why they added new transparency effects instead of btrfs support

That's of course also a reasonable question to ask! We all hope by asking these questions some Apple employee using a throwaway account will provide an answer on HN. HN is that magical place where such questions have the best chance of getting answered.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#137

Post by alwillis »

henry700 wrote: post #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 decad…

Here's the link to the Darwin, the underlying Unix layer of macOS, which is open source [1].

Go for it!

[1]: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#138

Post by hypercube33 »

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.

This is a disk image format so why not VHD? It seems like it's open enough and supports what a virtual disk needs what do we gain with yet another file that's a disk type?

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#139

Post by Dylan16807 »

duskwuff wrote: post #47
n_plus_1_acc wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it quaks like a disk image, it is a disk image

A filesystem is not a file. (Yes, you can store a filesystem in a file - and that's a trivial sort of disk image, but one with some serious drawbacks like "you have to allocate all of the space up front". We can do better.)

Some of the most popular disk image formats are basically a sparse file abstraction for non-sparse files and nothing more. You have a bunch of blocks, a table mapping each block to its virtual location, and a couple convenience headers.

If those count as a disk image when you put a filesystem inside, then I say a normal file is also a disk image when you put a filesystem inside.

Especially because the sparse mapping is optional. For example, lots of VHDs are a raw file plus a 512 byte footer.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#140

Post by Dylan16807 »

coldtea wrote: post #59
hulitu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For virtualizing a disk. We really don't have enough disk formats in this space. Is this bringing something new ? Or is just polluting the namespace.

> Is this bringing something new? If only there was a whole post available so one could find out...

The post only benchmarks against UDIF. Whether this brings something new is a very good question that is not answered by the post.

How complex is the format? Did they do anything clever? Did they engage in NIH? For all I know they switched the AES mode and made the blocks bigger and that's the entirety of the performance boost.

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