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Apple Introduces New File System AFPS With Tons Of 'Solid' Features (apple.com)
On the sidelines of its Worldwide Developer's Conference, Apple also quietly unveiled a new file system dubbed APFS (Apple File System). Here's how the company describes it: HFS+ and its predecessor HFS are more than 30 years old. These file systems were developed in an era of floppy disks and spinning hard drives, where file sizes were calculated in kilobytes or megabytes. Today, solid-state drives store millions of files, accounting for gigabytes or terabytes of data. There is now also a greater importance placed on keeping sensitive information secure and safe from prying eyes. A new file system is needed to meet the current needs of Apple products, and support new technologies for decades to come.Ars Technica dived into the documentation to find that APFS comes with a range of "solid" features including support for 64-bit inode numbering, and improved granularity of object time-stamping. "APFS supports nanosecond time stamp granularity rather than the 1-second time stamp granularity in HFS+." It also supports copy-on-write metadata scheme which aims to ensure that file system commits and writes to the file system journal stay in sync even if "something happens during the write -- like if the system loses power." The new file system offers an improvement over Apple's previous full-disk encryption File Vault application. It also features Snapshots (that lets you throw off a read-only instant of a file system at any given point in time), and Clones. According to the documentation, APFS can create file or directory clones -- and like a proper next-generation file system, it does so instantly, rather than having to wait for data to be copied. From the report: Also interesting is the concept of "space sharing," where multiple volumes can be created out of the same chunk of underlying physical space. This sounds on first glance a lot like enterprise-style thin provisioning, where you can do things like create four 1TB volumes on a single 1TB disk, and each volume grows as space is added to it. You can add physical storage to keep up with the volume's growth without having to resize the logical volume.As the documentation notes, things are in early stage, so it might take a while before AFPS becomes available to general users.
Licensing. Apple did flirt with ZFS, but for some reason, and I would guess it was license issues, they decided not to go that route. Using btrfs would bring GPL/BSD licensing issues. So, Apple either had to license something like ReFS from MS, or roll their own.
Would you want to be licensing anything from Oracle today?
What a ridiculous argument.
By that logic, backwards compatibility is never an issue. Why even try to offer it? You can just keep using the old version! Compatibility solved!
What kinds of files are people generating today? Pictures and video. What kinds of files are already compressed to begin with? Pictures and video. Compression doesn't make sense unless you have massive amounts of text or database files.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Gentle wish? Fuck your gentle wish. You're happy using unjustly overpriced SHIT because you're a dumbass. The rest of us who have more knowledge and experience then you'll ever have in your whole life, know better.
Been designing computer hardware and software since 1976.
Fluent in dozens (literally) of Assembly-languages from 6502 to ARM7 TDMI, plus C, PHP, HTML and several BASIC variants. Never did like C++ or Java, though...
Paid Embedded Developer (hardware and software) for nearly 40 years, with a specialty in R&D of industrial Real-Time measurement and control PRODUCTS.
Currently Develop Windows ERP Applications.
Certified MS SQL Server Admin.
The list goes on...
Yeah. I'm a dumbass alright.
STFU.
I like Apple equipment and OSes precisely BECAUSE I got all that "Work ON my computer" shit out of my system 30 frickin' YEARS ago.
Apple stuff isn't overpriced; because my time (and frustration) is actually WORTH something.