Apple File System Reference [pdf]

Kudos to Apple for providing the information. It's a hell of a lot better than reverse engineering the thing (see how many years it took to get NTFS down...)

Re: Apple File System Reference [pdf]

#5

Post by Rondom » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

chungy wrote: post #4

This seems like it's probably enough to re-implement APFS on non-Mac platforms; in fact, the about page (page 6) says as much. Kudos to Apple for providing the information. It's a hell of a lot better than reverse engineering the thing (see how many years it took to get NTFS down...)

There is already one third-party-implementation in the works. They sure find this helpful in their efforts.

https://github.com/sgan81/apfs-fuse

Re: Apple File System Reference [pdf]

#6

Post by Cyph0n » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

chungy wrote: post #4

This seems like it's probably enough to re-implement APFS on non-Mac platforms; in fact, the about page (page 6) says as much. Kudos to Apple for providing the information. It's a hell of a lot better than reverse engineering the thing (see how many years it took to get NTFS down...)

Agreed. I was honestly expecting a more hand-wavy explanation, but I was surprised that they dived into so much detail on, e.g., the structs used to represent various objects in APFS.

Re: Apple File System Reference [pdf]

#7

Post by atonse » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 6:31 PM UTC

Rondom wrote: post #5

chungy wrote: post #4

This seems like it's probably enough to re-implement APFS on non-Mac platforms; in fact, the about page (page 6) says as much. Kudos to Apple for providing the information. It's a hell of a lot better than reverse engineering the thing (see how many years it took to get NTFS down...)

There is already one third-party-implementation in the works. They sure find this helpful in their efforts. https://github.com/sgan81/apfs-fuse

This is user space – hopefully a kernel level one will come out as a result of this.

Or does it matter, performance-wise? People that know more can chime in.

Re: Apple File System Reference [pdf]

#8

Post by israrkhan » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 6:33 PM UTC

In past, I implemented HFS+ on an embedded rtos platform,. Technical Note TN1150 [1] proved to be extremely useful asset. From a cursory look, I feel TN1150 was much more detailed, and perhaps can be treated as a pre-req to this document. At least it should have been mentioned in this document.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn/tn1...

Re: Apple File System Reference [pdf]

#9

Post by saagarjha » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 6:40 PM UTC

sawaali wrote: post #3

plg wrote: post #2

fonts?

Should be San Francisco.

And San Francisco Mono for the monospaced font.

Re: Apple File System Reference [pdf]

#10

Post by saagarjha » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 6:41 PM UTC

It's nice to see that this is finally up; I know a lot of people have been clamoring for a more detailed reference for a while and this should hopefully make it easier for them to interact with APFS.