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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

#141

Post by jraph »

kccqzy wrote: post #101
jraph wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I don't think the question would make much sense. Why did Apple do X and not Y (unrelated to X) is not an interesting question. It would seem close to whataboutism. They were willing to spend money on X. They are not willing to spend money on Y. Or, they didn't think about doing Y. Or, they needed X. They haven't needed Y. Apple want fast VMs and also they haven't needed Btrfs. What insight can you get? There's no relation between the two. You'd get the same insight by asking "Why didn't Apple implement Btrfs?", but by linking the two in the same question, you are kinda implying there's a link.

But the question would have been highly relevant had Apple developed a new FS, and disk images and FS do seem related at first. I didn't want to assume whataboutism, so I figured OP was possibly confused because this is likely, and I wanted to give them a hint without bluntly asking whether they confused things. I could have, really there's no harm in being confused, nor in asking whether someone was confused.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#142

Post by shakna »

mdaniel wrote: post #123
shakna wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Unfortunately, no. OVA and OVF are defined in the OVF spec, but VMDK is not.

So congrats on finding the spec for it, as its no longer maintained! Its also no longer followed, either, unfortunately.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#143

Post by poisonwomb »

AnonC wrote: post #76

I skimmed through the article, but I have a question that I hope someone can answer. I have a sparse disk image created on a NAS (which runs Linux), and I use it to backup some stuff (not a VM) from the Mac in the native format (the macOS APFS file system). Would this new format, ASIF, make this faster and better whenever I switch to macOS Tahoe? I hope there wouldn’t be any gotchas with respect to storing this disk…

Yeah I’m interested in this as well. There’s something about the way time machine works over SMB that is absolutely unfashionably dog-slow. I suspect SMB performance on mac is just not very good in general tbf

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#144

Post by helmsb »

benguillet wrote: post #82

Would that potentially speed up Docker for Mac and others? (since it's using a vm underneath). That would address a major pain point

They also announced new APIs for native Linux containerization on MacOS with a specific focus on security and performance. This seems like it may be in support of that as well. Anything they can do to improve the performance of containers is a huge win. https://youtu.be/JvQtvbhtXmo?si=3OphClGvylHggmSW

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#145

Post by henry700 »

alwillis wrote: post #137
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...

You're joking, right? You can see at a glance that this mess is only published for compliance reasons. There is no documentation at all, and most of the code consists of numerous versions of open-source libraries that have been subtly modified due to their licensing requirements, which necessitate disclosure of modifications. Good luck building any flavor of that! See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35197308

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#146

Post by coldtea »

mihaaly wrote: post #121
coldtea wrote: post #57

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. 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.

Like 99% of the computer using world until less than a decade ago, when almost all drivers were kernel extensions and things like kexts were very much used?

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#147

Post by cortesoft »

atonse wrote: post #68
cortesoft wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting, ok. I don't even want to say "Use NTFS, doesn't everything support it?" because I'm not even sure that's the best solution for an SD card. Maybe with their new FSKit API [1], someone can build a compatibility layer for it. 1: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fskit?language=obj...

The best solution is to add support for EXT4 to mac and windows.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#148

Post by bradknowles »

tayiorrobinson wrote: post #115

The benchmarks are weird to me - the ASIF tests were done on M3/4, but for everything else it was done on an M1?

Yeah, that jumped out at me, too.

If they can’t re-run the benchmarks on the same hardware, it’s hard to compare the numbers.

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