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.

Comments

Re:Not Invented Here Syndrome?

[TheRaven64]

It wasn't before ZFS was CDDL, ZFS was CDDL from the start. I've heard two conflicting explanations of why Apple dropped support (after publicly announcing it) from different people in their CoreOS team. One of them involved Apple wanting a proprietary license (CDDL is per-file copyleft, so Apple would have had to release changes that they made to any of the ZFS files) with terms that Sun/Oracle wouldn't grant, though I get the impression that the NetApp lawsuit may have been more of an issue.

Re:If Swift is any guide...

[dgatwood]

So it could be 3-5 years in development already.

I suspect it has been in progress since Apple's decision to pull ZFS, which offered many of these features... and possibly longer. That's way more than 5 years; in fact, next year (the expected release year), it will have been the ten years that the GP says makes a filesystem trustworthy.