macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

NTFS was only supported well on Windows until recently; but extensions like NTFS Encryption (BitLocker) are still Windows only. Mac still does not let you write to an NTFS volume.

APFS and HFS+ are obviously Apple file systems.

FreeBSD does not support ext4 or Btrfs well; but instead prefers UFS2 or ZFS despite also being an open-source Unix-inspired OS.

The world runs on proprietary or non-universal file systems with CDFS (ISO 9660), FAT, and exFAT being the sole exceptions.

nemomarx• 1 year ago

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

bombcar4• 1 year ago

Is there a single filesystem in the world (besides "simple" ones like FAT) that both has an open standard AND is licensed in a "usable" codebase (MIT or other "non-copyleft" license)?

mystifyingpoi2• 1 year ago

NTFS was only supported well on Windows until recently

I remember using ntfs-3g without any issues on my first Linux laptop 15 years ago. So that's not really "recently".

mrpippy• 1 year ago

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...

duskwuff5• 1 year ago

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.

whywhywhywhy2• 1 year ago

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.

pxc• 1 year ago

Thanks for sharing about this! I didn't know, and I like to use (or at least play with) some third-party filesystems on macOS.

jraph2• 1 year ago

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.

crazygringo• 1 year ago

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.

kccqzy6• 1 year ago

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.

neuroelectron• 1 year ago

Can't abstract away your property that way.

xp842• 1 year ago

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.

dwaite2• 1 year ago

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.

hypercube33• 1 year ago

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?

pbronez• 1 year ago

Any chance this will reduce the space needed for major OS updates? Those have always been desperately inefficient.

duskwuff5• 1 year ago

No. Disk images aren't involved in the OS update process.

happyopossum• 1 year ago

They are - in that OS updates are delivered in and extracted from disk images. Not sure how they could be any more involved…

srameshc• 1 year ago

I hope they did something to not load my hard drive with all the AI crap and steal the storage.

platevoltage• 1 year ago

This ridiculous arms race can't be over soon enough.

moondev• 1 year ago

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vzd...

I guess this is the Apple version of qcow2 and friends

henry7002• 1 year ago

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.

alwillis• 1 year ago

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...

henry7002• 1 year ago

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

frizlab• 1 year ago

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

wmf• 1 year ago

Dupes are allowed after some number of hours.

90s_dev• 1 year ago

It depends. I tried posting a few links I came across over the past few days, and it just showed me dups but they were from days or weeks or sometimes months ago.

loeg• 1 year ago

I thought that number was significantly more than 9.

azhenley• 1 year ago

I think it is time * (votes+comments).

In practice, if it gets any real amount of votes or comments, you have to wait a year to repost. If it doesn't get any attention, it can be reposted quickly (though I think it should be a day later).

socalgal22• 1 year ago

It seems like, if the link is the same, submitting a dupe should just raise the original.

brudgers• 1 year ago

My guess is that “fastest gun in the west” might be a bit anti-pattern with respect to community.

Because in ye olden times, mild URL shenanigans seemed to have been a common hack to bypass more strict dupe detection.

And the community probably doesn’t really benefit from aggressive karma seeking —back then being first would give you a point for every resubmission. [1]

But that’s all speculation based on a supposition that what is more likely to be submitted by other users is not a better criterion for choosing to submit.

But I could very well be wrong and probably am.

[1] and number of submissions is probably at best a noisy signal for front page placement and might be negatively correlated with curiosity…I mean even here, what Apple is doing doesn’t stray too far from yesterday’s big press release by one of the most valuable corporations in the world.

brk• 1 year ago

Might be something weird with this domain. Look at the list of submissions, yours isn't the first dupe that was accepted in a relatively short time window.

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 year ago

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

burke• 1 year ago

If Apple would just ship bind mounts and FS/pid namespaces... or even just un-break chroot...

MBCook• 1 year ago

Unless they can migrate Time Machine to it. The performance improvements sound like they might be a real boon there.

kccqzy6• 1 year ago

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.

cyberflame• 1 year ago

Oh awesome! So it's more virtualisation-focused as opposed to HFS+ --> APFS migration?

aroman• 1 year ago

Apples and oranges. This is a new disk image format. You can create an APFS _volume_ in the ASIF _image_.

AnonC• 1 year ago

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 image on a NAS.

poisonwomb• 1 year ago

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

benguillet• 1 year ago

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

helmsb• 1 year ago

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

crest• 1 year ago

Has anyone found the specification for the format?

ThePowerOfFuet• 1 year ago

Was this not already a solved problem? Why reinvent the wheel other than for vendor lockin?

kccqzy6• 1 year ago

It's a solved problem in the sense that Apple solved it more than a decade ago. (The sparsebundle format was introduced in Mac OS X Leopard from 2007. The sparseimage format was even older; I saw discussions of using it with Panther.) Apple solved it again but made it faster.

layer8• 1 year ago

“Asif” is a fun name for a disk image format. It’s as-if it was a real disk. ;)

whycome• 1 year ago

Andor is a funny name for a tv show

teaearlgraycold• 1 year ago

Well, TV show and/or long movie depending on how you look at it.

archagon2• 1 year ago

What blew my mind recently was that I could store an APFS sparsebundle on a NAS drive, then mount it over NFS and use it as a plain old APFS volume. Despite the filesystem layering, it works pretty much like a local volume, albeit with a bit of performance degradation. Seems preferable to something like iSCSI for using APFS with network storage.

Perhaps this new format would work even better?

kccqzy6• 1 year ago

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.

archagon2• 1 year ago

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.

tayiorrobinson• 1 year ago

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

bradknowles• 1 year ago

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.

littlecranky67• 1 year ago

I wonder with the recent changes regarding containers and now disk images, if Apple plans to enter the server or cloud market.

macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

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