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.
creating a new non universal one is backing away from it
Being open-source, and even being in a popular open-source project, does not make a standard, or even imply inferiority to those who do not implement it.
If you need to connect a portable drive to machines of different OS's, there is no safe filesystem that supports read and write on both Windows and MacOS.
Alternatively, cloud storage works until the files are larger than the space you have left on Drive/Dropbox/OneDrive/etc., and local network sharing (on certain networks at least) is more complicated than what the average user is willing to put up with. In practice, many use USB flash drives or external HDDs/SSDs with exFAT. Yeah, people should have more than one backup, but we know in the real world that's not what many do. That requires them spending more time (e.g. configuring local network sharing or setting up an old machine lying around to be a NAS) or money (more on cloud storage.) In practice, having a cross-platform, journaled filesystem would lead to a lot less data loss.
Aside from exFAT, the only alternative with native cross-platform R/W capability is FAT32, but while it has a redundant file allocation table (unlike exFAT), it has a max file size of 4GB, which limits its usefulness for many workflows.
What are potential use cases where you'd want to support those additional file systems? External drives?
I wanted to just plug in the card and copy files, but couldn’t.
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...
For example ReFS removed the MFT which caused various problems.
The MFT was annoying because if you create 1 mil files, and the delete them, the MFT will not be shrunk back.
Have you ever benchmarked it against NTFS? With the same exact set of FS filter drivers running on both? How much does the performance differ?
if GPL is a non-starter for you, youre missing the point of the open standard. apple already discloses a litany of various GPL it ships. XFS would be no different.
I remember using ntfs-3g without any issues on my first Linux laptop 15 years ago. So that's not really "recently".
Until 4 years ago, nothing was good enough for the upstream Linux kernel.
Nightmare to evaluate the options, pure stress testing the options, difficult to know if it didn’t mess something up.
I was going to add some additional comments about this, but then I found that Paragon's website has an FAQ that covers everything I was going to say (and more): https://www.paragon-software.com/us/home/ntfs3-driver-faq/
Given how many people use FUSE, Paragon NTFS for Mac, and similar tools, you're hardly totally representative.
What percentage of MacOS users even know what that is. I mean I am in the percent but I know it's sub 0.001
Edit: but to be fair, that's mostly only relevant for unsupported network filesystems like sshfs...
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.
I don't really understand your objection to be honest. Drivers for storage are common on other platforms
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.
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.
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.
We really don't have enough disk formats in this space. Is this bringing something new ? Or is just polluting the namespace.
If only there was a whole post available so one could find out...
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.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vzd...
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.
Oh wait, I just answered my question.
After all, there's no such agreement on Linux either - we just have all the Linux vendor options available.
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.
I guess this is the Apple version of qcow2 and friends
Go for it!
[1]: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...
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).
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.
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.
Perhaps this new format would work even better?
bigyabai•22h ago
aaronmdjones•21h ago
zymhan•21h ago
n_plus_1_acc•21h ago
duskwuff•21h ago
(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.)
Dylan16807•10h ago
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.
zymhan•17h ago
shakna•18h ago
So very many of them are just header details + "only works with our tools".
[0] https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/interop/qcow2.html
mannyv•17h ago
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
shakna•17h ago
mdaniel•16h ago
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
shakna•8h ago
So congrats on finding the spec for it, as its no longer maintained! Its also no longer followed, either, unfortunately.
tobias3•16h ago