Apple is Upgrading Millions of iOS Devices To a New Modern File System Today (theverge.com)

Apple today began rolling out iOS 10.3, the latest point update to its mobile operating system. iOS 10.3 brings with it several new features, chief among which is a new file system -- called the Apple File System (APFS). From a report: It's a file system that was originally announced at WWDC last year, and it's designed with the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV in mind. Apple has been using its 31-year-old Hierarchical File System (HFS) for iOS devices so far. It was originally designed for Macs with floppy or hard disks, and not for modern mobile devices with solid state storage. Even its successor, HFS+, still doesn't address the needs of these mobile devices enough. Apple's new APFS is designed to scale across these new types of devices and take advantage of flash or SSD storage. It's also engineered with encryption as a primary feature, and even supports features like snapshots so restoring files on a Mac or even an iOS device might get a lot easier in the future.

Comments

First

[Anonymous Coward]

Sent from APFS

Catch?

[nwaack]

Hmmm...this actually sounds like a useful upgrade. Given Apple's recent "innovations," I'm left wondering what the catch is. There must be something in this update that screws over the customer somewhere.

Re:Catch?

[OriginalSpaceMan]

Who knows... maybe it won't be a smoke and mirrors type of screw-over. It could just be that your device stops working because it can't boot up after "taking on a big task to carefully and silently update millions of iOS devices."

Re:Catch?

[GerbilSoft]

Not readable on anything other than Apple products, at least initially. Then again, the Linux HFS+ driver still can't write to volumes that have journalling enabled...

Re:Catch?

[Proudrooster]

Apple File System is designed to avoid metadata corruption caused by system crashes. Instead of overwriting existing metadata records in place, it writes entirely new records, points to the new ones and then releases the old ones. This avoids a crash during an update resulting in a corrupted record containing partial old and partial new data. It also avoids having to write the change twice as happens with an existing HFS+ Journaled file system where changes are written first to the journal and then to the Catalog file.[3]

Still no checksum for user data like ext4. But it might help iPhones will sudden battery failure.

Re:Catch?

[GerbilSoft]

Ext4 doesn't have user data checksums, only metadata: https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/i...

Re:Catch?

[DogDude]

I'm sure that all current Apple products will have to be replaced. That's always their catch.

Re:Catch?

[Goaway]

That sounds reasonable, except for every single part of the statement being a complete falsehood.

Re:Catch?

[DogDude]

From further down this thread... "I kinda would like my iPod Touch to be upgraded past 9.3. It's not really that old."

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Current iOS devices aren't readable by anything anyway without extreme measures, so nothing is lost (yet).

Remember, iOS =/= macOS.

ironic captcha: justify

Re: Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it can't be updated past 9.3 then it must be the 2012 model. I understand the frustration of not being able to update your MP3 player but none of the comparable iPhones and iPads got the update to iOS 10 either. The 2015 model of the iPod touch does get iOS 10 and likely 11. To be fair, the 2012 model got iOS 6, 7, 8 and 9 before being dropped.

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes I would agree, although I will wait a while before upgrading to see how many bugs need to be worked out.

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's MODERN citizen.
It's a NEW, MODERN OS, not the frumpy old OS you've been using for months now. This OS is MODERN, with MODERN things you WANT and none of the old-fashioned stuff your grandparents used.
So shut up and upgrade! It's MODERN!

Re:Catch?

[aliquis]

ZFS have checksums.

Sadly we don't use ZFS for some stupid reason (maybe RAM for instance but I'd just get more RAM if needed.)

Re:Catch?

[thegarbz]

There must be something in this update that screws over the customer somewhere.

It could just be the latest Apple copying Samsung. Specifically the original Galaxy S. The catch there was that the replacement filesystem for mobile phones (Samsung RFS) was so slow during R/W operations that the OS actually would think programs locked up while performing I/O operations and force close them. "Lagfix" patches to fix this problem actually simply reformatted the system and data partitions with JFFS or ext2.

Re: Catch?

[amiga3D]

5 years seems to be the anticipated lifetime in the Apple world. Some survive a bit longer but on borrowed time.

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

User: I need to weld a metal lawn bench.
You: As a professional. you need a $3000 TIG welder otherwise the result is going to be crap.

Re:Catch?

[Carewolf]

Ext4 doesn't have user data checksums, only metadata: https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/i...

I think it is an option. Journaled metadata is the default, but you can choose journaled data too. It is just not very well performing. The B-tree structure of writing new entries and switching atomically works much better that way.

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

ZFS have checksums.

Sadly we don't use ZFS for some stupid reason (maybe RAM for instance but I'd just get more RAM if needed.)

At one point Apple was working on replacing hfs with zfs, but licensing issues ruined that and they cancelled the project.

Re: Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's odd. My iPhone 5 updated to 10.3 just fine.

Re:Catch?

[Dixie_Flatline]

I've been running iOS 10.3 beta for the whole run on an iPhone 6 with 16GB of storage. There haven't been any problems, despite the limited space that it has to work with and how much it has to go and flush cache files and whatnot. I'd be surprised if there are more than a handful of problems related to the upgrade.

Re:Catch?

[TheFakeTimCook]

Hmmm...this actually sounds like a useful upgrade. Given Apple's recent "innovations," I'm left wondering what the catch is. There must be something in this update that screws over the customer somewhere.

Nope, sorry.

This is their response to other COW Filesystems, such as ZFS. Another thing that could have been wonderful, if Oracle hadn't locked it away for themselves.

Re: Catch?

[DontBeAMoran]

My mid-2010 Mac mini has survived on borrowed time for five years. Since january 2016, however, it has been getting by using small time loans every few months.

Re:Catch?

[TheFakeTimCook]

ZFS have checksums.

Sadly we don't use ZFS for some stupid reason (maybe RAM for instance but I'd just get more RAM if needed.)

There are a number of reasons why we don't use ZFS; some technical, some political.

This is a good alternative.

Re:Catch?

[TheFakeTimCook]

I've been running iOS 10.3 beta for the whole run on an iPhone 6 with 16GB of storage. There haven't been any problems, despite the limited space that it has to work with and how much it has to go and flush cache files and whatnot. I'd be surprised if there are more than a handful of problems related to the upgrade.

Thanks for the info. I'd still back my iphone up TWICE before installing iOS 10.3, though...

Re:Catch?

[TheFakeTimCook]

Not readable on anything other than Apple products, at least initially. Then again, the Linux HFS+ driver still can't write to volumes that have journalling enabled...

And NTFS is STILL not documented; so...

Re:Catch?

[TheFakeTimCook]

There must be something in this update that screws over the customer somewhere.

It could just be the latest Apple copying Samsung. Specifically the original Galaxy S. The catch there was that the replacement filesystem for mobile phones (Samsung RFS) was so slow during R/W operations that the OS actually would think programs locked up while performing I/O operations and force close them. "Lagfix" patches to fix this problem actually simply reformatted the system and data partitions with JFFS or ext2.

This is Apple, not Slamdung. They actually HAVE an engineering staff that understands things other than how to cold-copy the competition.

Re: Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

No doubt it is proprietary, thus breaking compatibility with everything else out there. They could have use f2fs, which is open source and built with SSDs and flash storage in mind.

Re:Catch?

[BronsCon]

You mean, like... using Samsung displays and RAM and having their CPUs manufactured in Samsung-owned foundries?

Re: Catch?

[mspohr]

Software kills computers.
I have a 2010 MacBook Air which became progressively more stupid with each software "upgrade" to the point where it was unusable.
I replaced it with a cheap Chromebook which has much better performance.
However, it's tax time so I broke out the old MacBook to do my taxes. On a whim I installed the Opera browser and I feel like I have a new MacBook! Safari, FireFox and Chrome browsers would peg the CPU at 100% for literally minutes while they did god knows what. With Opera, CPU only goes to about 80% for a few seconds (ad block and VPN turned on).
I'd like to know what the problem is with those other browsers but I'm happy now with Opera.

Re:Catch?

[aliquis]

They added support for it.
Whatever it was to replace HFS I don't know. Also not why they didn't continue with it.

Re: Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

better than dead as soon as bought in Android world

Re: Catch?

[Megane]

Until a few weeks ago, I had been using a Blue & White G3 for an internet server (HTTP, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, as well as NAT/DHCP). They date back to the turn of the century. But after moving it to a different city and a differently configured LAN, netinfo started getting confused and locking up the system for anything beyond simple UI activities, sometimes hours after boot, sometimes minutes.

It was so slow that its load average shot way up and noticeably bogged down the NAT performance when one of those "hail mary" SSH abuse bots slammed it with dozens of attempts per second. (Because of course you should keep trying a bunch of different SSH passwords for root on an OS X system, one of them is sure to be right!)

It had been so long since I had last updated its configuration that I had to migrate to Apache 2 and mod_perl 2, and recompile new versions of all the services because I was moving to an Intel mac mini. 2010-2012 era Macs are still quite relevant, partly because Intel CPUs haven't gotten significantly better since then, and they can actually be upgraded years later, unlike newer models.

Re: Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure the filesystem you wrote is much better...

Re: Catch?

[thebullshitpatrol]

Remind me again how long the average Android software support lifetime is?

t. someone that just dropped android/nexus because I realized I was about to get memed by google with Apple prices, sub-Apple UX/build quality, and 2 years of software support on a $700 device.

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple buys components from suppliers like Samsung) and uses contract manufacturers like Samsung.
What does this have to do with building a new filesystem?

Re: Catch?

[ls671]

Of course it was.

-Hans

Re:Catch?

[mlts]

I will say that APFS is a must have update from HFS+. It has copy-on-write functionality, snapshots, and other stuff that make sense. It has a very interesting facility for encryption to allow for volume, file, and almost anything in between, with keys for everything able to be different.

However, it doesn't have the good bit-rot detection that ZFS, ReFS + Storage Spaces, and btrfs have. In fact, it doesn't have any real robust drive scrubbing type facility to find and (even better) repair ECC errors. I read that Apple is assuming that all data is stored on "premium" storage media, so they didn't add CRC checking to the code. Or, this could be not included due to performance reasons.

In any case, this is much needed upgrade. However, it still is behind everyone else, especially when it comes to bit rot.

Re:Catch?

[BronsCon]

What does whether or not Apple or their competitors cold-copy the competition have to do with building a new filesystem? Probably nothing, but that's what I was replying to; if you're going to complain about the derailment of the discussion, complain to the guy who derailed it, dick.

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, sorry.

This is their response to other COW Filesystems, such as ZFS. Another thing that could have been wonderful, if Oracle hadn't locked it away for themselves.

WUT

No no , Apple was preparing to jump to ZFS way back in 2007 for Leopard, even rolling out beta support (which eventually got opensourced sorta into that FUSE setup), then Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz ran his big mouth and Steve Jobs brought down the black turtleneck hammer of doom and ended that collaboration.

It could have been beautiful, but it all ended with loose lips sinking that ship.

https://apple.slashdot.org/story/07/06/07/1414206/sun-ceo-says-zfs-will-be-the-file-system-for-osx

Re:Catch?

[TheFakeTimCook]

You mean, like... using Samsung displays and RAM and having their CPUs manufactured in Samsung-owned foundries?

Samsung has fantastic FABRICATION capabilities. And they have some great COMPONENT engineering, too.

But as far as PRODUCT engineering, they are wildly inconsistent and unfocused.

Re:Catch?

[TheFakeTimCook]

I will say that APFS is a must have update from HFS+. It has copy-on-write functionality, snapshots, and other stuff that make sense. It has a very interesting facility for encryption to allow for volume, file, and almost anything in between, with keys for everything able to be different.

However, it doesn't have the good bit-rot detection that ZFS, ReFS + Storage Spaces, and btrfs have. In fact, it doesn't have any real robust drive scrubbing type facility to find and (even better) repair ECC errors. I read that Apple is assuming that all data is stored on "premium" storage media, so they didn't add CRC checking to the code. Or, this could be not included due to performance reasons.

In any case, this is much needed upgrade. However, it still is behind everyone else, especially when it comes to bit rot.

Bit rot repair is nice when it works. But it is pretty fragile in ZFS. Also, since Apple is moving to an all-SSD ecosystem, CRCs become far less necessary; because it isn't really an ANALOG read/write system like with spinning rust.

Re:Catch?

[BronsCon]

I'm not sure that holds true; I've owned a number of Samsung and Apple devices over the past decade (in fact, I currently own many of both) and, to be quite honest, I'd say I've been watching Samsung's product engineering improve while Apple's has been on a steady decline for the past 6-7 years or so.

We're going to disagree on that point, of course, and that's fine. What you look for in a well-engineered product, and what I look for in the same, are different, because we have different needs and we use our products differently. In that vein, I'll grant Apple a clear win on the iPad, but Samsung takes the win on phones; I use the two classes of device differently, so my needs for one necessarily differ from my needs for the other. I'll also point out that Samsung covers a wider variety of products than Apple so, naturally, their focus will appear more spread out; these various lines are designed, engineered, manufactured, and distributed by distinct groups within Samsung, though, each of which has its own focus. Apple, meanwhile, cannibalizes one team to shift focus to another product line, which is why I observe that their product engineering is on a decline; they've very much focus-shifted toward mobile, and that certainly shows in the improvements the iPad has seen, all the while their computer lineup is all but rotting.

It's sad, really, as I would love to have taken what I just spent on a new PC build and spent it on more recent Mac workstation hardware; but there is no more recent Mac workstation hardware. The Mac Pro is 4 years old and was already a year out of date at launch, and I simply need more processing power than any current Mac system can give me, as well as the ability to run Adobe apps (not as a primary function, mind you, but I do need them running natively). The combination of those realities forced me to make some concessions, such as not running a native UNIX-like environment, as I can't run MacOS on fast-enough hardware and I can't run Adobe apps natively under Linux.

I'm not alone in this, either. Where I used to see new Macs being bought left and right for production environments, I'm seeing PC builds rolling in as their replacements; and for the reasons stated above.

Mind you, Samsung is no better in that regard; but, then, they've never really billed themselves as a company that provides a superior desktop or workstation. Apple, on the other hand, claims just that, while their product engineering fails to deliver on the promise.

And I really am missing the native UNIX-like environment that can also run all of my applications natively. This is not an attack on Apple, I'm not senselessly attacking them or putting them down; I am dissenting, in the hope that, come the time for my next hardware upgrade, my voice will be heard. And I'm not just bitching on Slashdot, I communicate my dissatisfaction to colleagues of mine at Apple, most of whom work on the software side of things and agree with me, as they could do a lot more with the software side of things on more capable hardware. Unfortunately, though they relay the complaints (often before they've even heard them from me, as they have the same complaints), their voices also appear to go unheard.

But, mostly, I was pointing out the irony in calling Samsung "Samdung" when Apple uses many Samsung parts in their own products. This, of course, is amplified by the fact that, historically, when Apple moves away from Samsung parts (e.g. Retina displays), customer satisfaction decreases (e.g. Panasonic pink tint) until Apple brings Samsung back into the fold.

And, here's the rub: Apple fans get to foot the bill when Apple sues Samsung. Samsung isn't raising the cost of Samsung consumer goods to cover the legal bills and settlements; they're raising the prices they charge Apple for parts. Go ahead and laugh your way to the bank every time Apple wins a patent suit against Samsung; you'll need to make an extra withdrawal to cover your next Apple purchase.

Part of me wi

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, like... using Samsung displays and RAM and having their CPUs manufactured in Samsung-owned foundries?

Ohh, you mean all the stuff Samsung stole from other companies, that technology?

Re:Catch?

[Waccoon]

It took them this long to adopt "safe saving?"

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm not sure that holds true;"

ROTFL. Galaxy Note 7.

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

I did.

Re:Catch?

[thegarbz]

Slamdung

Please finish Tim Cook's blowjob before typing. It's hard to read your shit when you can't spell.

Re: Catch?

[konohitowa]

I got 9 months of support on my Galaxy Tab 10.1. And then the 6-month late Android update came that screwed it up so badly that I had to root it to fix it. Fortunately that was a common problem, so it least there were instructions on multiple forums on how to fix it. Samsung never did address it. And that was it. Abandoned.

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

> because it isn't really an ANALOG read/write system like with spinning rust.

By that criterion, ALL media are analog-- unless you're working at the quantum level where physical things really do have discrete states.

Digital/analog isn't about the technology used, it's about the signal.

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is analog somewhere. The amount of electrons in the gate for example. One heap of electronics amount to a "1", another level gives you a "2", etc... especially with MLC SSDs that can have three or more bits associated with a pile of electrons in a gate. This is why when SSDs fail, they fail hard, as in your data is -gone-. Having CRCs would be nice because SSDs still have an unknown lifetime, but it seems like Apple thinks that bit rot doesn't happen on their products.

Re:Catch?

[BronsCon]

LOL. iPhone 6.

Re:Catch?

[BronsCon]

Right. Where are all the successful lawsuits, then? Nowhere? Got it.

Who made mass-producible 192+ DPI displays before Samsung? Whose DRAM chip design did they copy? Who'd they steal the masks from for their Exynos CPUs? I suppose they stole the specs and designs for the various DACs, encoders, and other useful bits of silicon they sell, as well. Right?

You know, if that were true, Apple would be just as liable, since it's (supposedly) public knowledge and Apple still uses Samsung parts. Knowingly buying stolen goods is a felony and knowingly buying goods that infringe on someone else's patent is a civil infraction for which one can be sued and held liable for damages equal to, or greater than, those for which the infringer might be liable.

So, basically, your claim is that Apple is run by complete idiots who would knowingly buy infringing and/or stolen parts, and employs an incompetent legal department who would let them actually do it. Somehow, I'm not buying that. For all their faults, Apple is smarter than that.

Re:Catch?

[Shirley Marquez]

Microsoft still hasn't released a full NTFS document, and their source code isn't available except to limited numbers of people under an NDA. But there is a full read-write implementation of it in Linux, so that source code should reveal a lot about how NTFS works.

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your self-delusion is truly impressive.

Re:Catch?

[PhunkySchtuff]

Apple even went as far as having ZFS in one of the betas for (IIRC 10.4 or 10.5?). You couldn't make the boot disk ZFS, but you could use all the z* commands in Terminal to manage your pools. And, then in the RC it was yanked.

Re: Catch?

[amiga3D]

Only a matter of time until it can't run the latest OS X. Of course you can still use it, it just wont get security updates anymore. Then there's Linux. I really just meant until Apple abandoned it.

Re: Catch?

[amiga3D]

I've got a 2 year old S5 that just got an update from AT&T the other day. I was kind of amazed.

Re: Catch?

[amiga3D]

But you are a geek. You can make old stuff continue to be relevant. Imagine an ordinary user with an old machine that no longer gets updates.

Re: Catch?

[amiga3D]

So it seems the premium for Apple gear might not be such a bad deal? And actually Samsung is almost as pricey as Apple.

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the guy who is constantly sucking Nadella's cock.

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bit rot repair in ZFS requires parity from RAIDZ or a duplicate of the block from a mirror or multiple copies on the same drive. ZFS actually allows you to tweak the number of duplicate blocks for meta-data and logical data separately per volume. You can not only have two copies of the data across N number of copies across multiple drives, but N number per drive. As long as one of the copies exist, ZFS can repair.

Re: Catch?

[thebullshitpatrol]

This is precisely why I'm no longer an android zealot.

Samsung is literally retarded, and thinks their garbage is worth Apple prices. Google is less deluded and offers a decent UX, however it is still severely lacking in cohesiveness compared to iOS, and has a 2 year expiration date.

5 years ago the holy benchmark wars mattered. Now? For $800 I want top tier build quality and a top tier ecosystem.

Re:Catch?

[Agripa]

Apple File System is designed to avoid metadata corruption caused by system crashes. Instead of overwriting existing metadata records in place, it writes entirely new records, points to the new ones and then releases the old ones. This avoids a crash during an update resulting in a corrupted record containing partial old and partial new data. It also avoids having to write the change twice as happens with an existing HFS+ Journaled file system where changes are written first to the journal and then to the Catalog file.[3]

Still no checksum for user data like ext4. But it might help iPhones will sudden battery failure.

This by itself is not sufficient for NAND Flash storage as a lot of SSD manufacturers have discovered and then ignored. An interrupted write to NAND Flash do to power loss can result in corrupted data in *other* blocks. So battery failure leading to power loss can still result in NAND Flash corruption.

Has this even been a problem on Apple devices? I assumed they shutdown before actual power loss.

Re:Catch?

[TheFakeTimCook]

Microsoft still hasn't released a full NTFS document, and their source code isn't available except to limited numbers of people under an NDA. But there is a full read-write implementation of it in Linux, so that source code should reveal a lot about how NTFS works.

And recent versions of macOS also have full R/W NTFS drivers; but you have to explicity enable the write-permission in Terminal, and on a drive-by-drive basis, because Apple doesn't really trust it, I guess...

Re:Catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. Where are all the successful lawsuits, then? Nowhere? Got it.

Yeah, you sure as hell got "it". Do they pay you per bullshit post, or a lump sum monthly?

Anyway, here's one case, how many more do you want? Well, for good meassire, here's one more. I could go on, but you will pretend you didn't lose another argument. So why bother.

Oh, what the heck, here's one they settled after years of refusing to pay royalties Suck on it, SamsungCon.

About time... HFS+ is crap

[Proudrooster]

In an interview at Melbourne's linux.conf.au conference, Linus Torvalds called the standard file system of Mac OS X "complete and utter crap." Mac fans are only slightly outraged, pointing out that HFS+ isn't really "complete and utter crap," rather, it's just slightly crap-ish.

On a personal level, I have had multiple corrupt HFS+ filesystems, one of which was unrecoverable. I tried switching to exFAT which also proved to be corruptible but repairable. Now I just store any data I care about on a NAS running a linux ext4 filesystem.

Hopefully, AFS will fix these corruption problems. I have been sending Apple upgrade suggestions for years. Looks like they finally got around to it. One filesystem to rule them all, but will it support upper/lower case?

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[Anonymous Coward]

forget about upper/lower case... this new file system doesn't even support accent characters.

tons of german developers with ë all over their filesystem are watching their entire stack go up in flames.

you're all idiots.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[AaronD12]

> upper/lower case Are you talking about HFS+ Case Sensitive? It's been there for years in Mac OS X, though it can cause issues with sloppy applications that rely on case insensitivity.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you are already running a NAS, you may be interested in ZFS on Linux or FreeNAS for a BSD system as a way to bring ZFS into your mix.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[angel'o'sphere]

Actually both World if Warcraft and Eve Online can not perform an online upgrade on a case sensitive HFS+
Well, don't know it is right now, but while I had them on a case sensitive external drive a few years ago, they both complained during updates.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[fisted]

ë isn't part of the german alphabet

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[Anonymous Coward]

They've been trying for a long time now. At one point in the 10.5 or 10.6 era of OS X, they had a working ZFS implementation that got scrapped at the very last second before shipping because reasons.

Apple knows that HFS+ is garbage, and has been working to fix that.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[Carewolf]

ë isn't part of the german alphabet

Neither are ü ;)

German accented letter are not separate letters and thus not in the alphabet. More importantly: ë isn't used in German.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[Kobun]

I've used Nas4Free pretty happily in the past as well - https://www.nas4free.org/

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[TheFakeTimCook]

Now I just store any data I care about on a NAS running a linux ext4 filesystem.

Yeah, that sure helped with a 4 drive RAID in a Buffalo NAS a friend had, that couldn't rebuild the array with just one failed HD.

Got almost all the data back; but it wasn't any fun. Had to purchase software that let me pull out the drives, mount them in external enclosures, and mount/read the array from his Mac mini.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[TheFakeTimCook]

Actually both World if Warcraft and Eve Online can not perform an online upgrade on a case sensitive HFS+
Well, don't know it is right now, but while I had them on a case sensitive external drive a few years ago, they both complained during updates.

And that's Apple's fault?

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[Anonymous Coward]

AFS is a completely different beast. AFS is the Andrew Filesystem and has existed for two decades. What Apple is rolling out now is APFS.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[TheFakeTimCook]

They've been trying for a long time now. At one point in the 10.5 or 10.6 era of OS X, they had a working ZFS implementation that got scrapped at the very last second before shipping because reasons.

Apple knows that HFS+ is garbage, and has been working to fix that.

Not because "reasons". Because Oracle.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[angel'o'sphere]

Why do you ask such a question is beyond me.
But alas there are no 'stupid questions' only 'stupid answers'.
Or as Master Ken would phrase it: 'only stupid people, that ask those questions'.
I lost track, what eas your question again?

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a decently functional port of OpenZFS to OSX at http://o3x.org

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[Drinking Bleach]

The new file system is just a bag of bytes for names. You can store ë just fine, any way you want it (though UTF-8 and composed are probably the best options).

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[fluffernutter]

If you own a mac you quickly realize it will always be the platform software works the worst on, especially open source stuff, and even when compared to linux. It gets annoying. Would I blame Apple for any specific software? No, but obviously there is something wrong with their ecosystem that it consistently doesn't get as much developer attention.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[Megane]

On a personal level, I have had multiple corrupt HFS+ filesystems, one of which was unrecoverable.

The problem with HFS+ isn't so much HFS+ as it is the ancient code that is still used to fsck it. Back in the day, Norton Utilities for Mac had a good disk repair, and the current good repair utility is DiskWarrior, but fsck_hfs apparently still uses the same basic code that dates back to the '90s.

but will it support upper/lower case?

HFS+ has supported case-sensitive mode for years, but you do have to make the choice when the partition is first formatted, and it's not recommended for the boot partition, just in case some random program fails with it.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[_merlin]

Adobe Creative Suite was a major one a while back. Don't know if that's changed, I only run CC on Windows now.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[_merlin]

Seriously don't use FreeNAS. It's crap, doesn't give you enough control over how stuff is configured, and has weird issues that vanilla FreeBSD with ZFS doesn't have. Use vanilla FreeBSD if you don't need directory service integration. If you need directory service integration, use CentOS 7 and ZFS on Linux.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[TheFakeTimCook]

Why do you ask such a question is beyond me.
But alas there are no 'stupid questions' only 'stupid answers'.
Or as Master Ken would phrase it: 'only stupid people, that ask those questions'.
I lost track, what eas your question again?

Dunno.

It was lost in all that self-aggrandizement.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[TheFakeTimCook]

If you own a mac you quickly realize it will always be the platform software works the worst on, especially open source stuff, and even when compared to linux. It gets annoying. Would I blame Apple for any specific software? No, but obviously there is something wrong with their ecosystem that it consistently doesn't get as much developer attention.

I sure hope OSS doesn't run slow on macOS, because about 80% of the OS itself is based on Open Source projects.

And any performance issues with ported Linux applications are 100% due to sloppy porting of libraries.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[dhaen]

I've never had a corrupt HFS+ filesystem. Can't elaborate 'cause I need to investigate why I've got this spinning beachball when I select Finder...

Sent from my iMac

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[Proudrooster]

Yes, I had a hardware problem on my Mac and it was hanging on boot, so I would occasionally have to power it off/on. Rarely, the system would spontaneously reboot. This was more than HFS+ could deal with and it started corrupting the filesystems. I don't think it was able to do a good job of fsck-ing on boot which led to the corruption. In any case the hardware problem has been fixed (it was slot-creep) due to heat but I still on occasion lose the exFat partition even though there are no more hardware problems. A simple fsck_exfat and remounting gets me going again, but it is aggravating.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[gnasher719]

HFS+ has supported case-sensitive mode for years, but you do have to make the choice when the partition is first formatted, and it's not recommended for the boot partition, just in case some random program fails with it.

Problem is that very few people use it, including very few developers. Let's say a game installer creates a "World Of Warcraft" folder, then copies files into the "World of Warcraft" folder, that would work on most machines, including mine, including most likely that developer's machine, but not on a case sensitive file system.

On the other hand, iPhone file system has always been case sensitive.

Re:About time... HFS+ is crap

[Anonymous Coward]

If you own a mac you quickly realize it will always be the platform software works the worst on, especially open source stuff

Not sure where this is coming from... I've never had issues with OSS on my Macs unless it was specifically designed for Linux or other platform.

My MacBook Pro runs Mac, Windows, and Unix software just fine. That flexibility makes it the best computer I have ever owned, hands down.

Back in my day

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in my day, a new filesystem would denote more than just a point release.

Re:Back in my day

[Anonymous Coward]

Infrastructure that's more trustworthy is certainly considered valuable these days, but it doesn't have a very shiny appearance to most of the customer base.

Re:Back in my day

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in my day, a new filesystem would denote more than just a point release.

True. But then back in your day you used two digits to represent the year.

Re:Back in my day

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe on some not so great OS (MS?) IBM's OS/2 only increased a full version 1 time, when it went from the 16 bit largely MS built OS to the 32 bit IBM driven and owned version. All the other releases were point releases or even minor point releases. Even the Linux kernel underwent some major internal revisions a while back that broke some applications with a point release. I can't recall the revision, but it was in the 2.6x timeframe?

Re:Back in my day

[russotto]

Back in my day, a new filesystem would denote more than just a point release.

HFS+ was introduced in MacOS 8.1 (a point release of Mac OS 8). HFS in System 2.1 (following 2.0).

Backup Your Device

[lazarus]

In the spirit of "what could possibly go wrong" this may actually be one of those times you want to back up your device before upgrading.

Re:Backup Your Device

[thegarbz]

In the spirit of "what could possibly go wrong" this may actually be one of those times you want to back up your device before upgrading.

Samsung's original Galaxy S ran on a special purpose filesystem called RFS. What did go wrong there is that it was so slow that the OS often force closed running apps while they were performing I/O operations as it thought that the apps had crashed. The fix was to convert the filesystem to something else.

Re:Backup Your Device

[TheFakeTimCook]

In the spirit of "what could possibly go wrong" this may actually be one of those times you want to back up your device before upgrading.

You betcha!

Re:Backup Your Device

[hcs_$reboot]

The fix was to convert the filesystem to something else

An explosive improvement.

I would like my iPod Touch to be upgraded past 9.3

[kriston]

I kinda would like my iPod Touch to be upgraded past 9.3. It's not really that old.

#5 on list of things we need more of!

[Anonymous Coward]

Great! This is definitely on the list of things the computer industry needs more of!

1. Text editors
2. chat apps
3. web apps
4. Office program file formats
5. Filesystems
6. Linux distributions
7. Code style guidelines.
8. Types of serial ports.
9. Types of video ports.

Glad to see people tackling some of these.

Re:#5 on list of things we need more of!

[DontBeAMoran]

#0. More emojis!

here. we. go!

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern APP APPERS don't use any luddite filesystem to store their data. They use APPFS to APP their APPS in! APPS!

Don't blame a filesystem for your lack of backup

[zerofoo]

If you lose data due to a corrupt filesystem - it's not the filesystem's fault that you didn't backup your data.

Even if you had the most reliable filesystem in the world - it would, most likely be running on spinning disks or flash media - both fail quite regularly.

Backup your data frequently and test your backups regularly.

Access?

[captaindomon]

And we'll all have access to the file system from the native iOS UI right? Riiiiiiight?

Re: Access?

[Anonymous Coward]

You (over)payed for apple... enjoy your lemons.

Re:Access?

[Cro Magnon]

And we'll all have access to the file system from the native iOS UI right? Riiiiiiight?

Bwahaha!

Re: Access?

[DontBeAMoran]

What do you mean? U+1F34B or :lemon:?

Re: Access?

[Anonymous Coward]

More like lemon party.

Security

[xushi]

Will this add any security against NSA / Immigration trying to steal your data?

Re:Security

[Anonymous Coward]

No but it will probably help apple steal it.

Re:Security

[TheFakeTimCook]

Will this add any security against NSA / Immigration trying to steal your data?

Per-file encryption. Get one file decrypted, that's all you get. Now, start again on the next file...

Re:Security

[TheFakeTimCook]

No but it will probably help apple steal it.

STUFF IT, ASSHOLE!

Re:Security

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to start naming all my files numerically. Looking for something specific? Try file 32938. Or was that 41005?

Will this affect known methods for breaking in?

[Glarimore]

I'm wondering if this will affect known methods used by law enforcement to break into iPhones in high-profile cases (such as the San Bernardino shooting). Anyone have any insight as to whether the underlying encryption has an affect on those attack vectors?

Trying to avoid talking about whether it is a good or bad thing that police can break into iPhones when necessary -- just curious if anyone has any technical insight.

Re:Will this affect known methods for breaking in?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/20...

Re:Will this affect known methods for breaking in?

[gnasher719]

I'm wondering if this will affect known methods used by law enforcement to break into iPhones in high-profile cases (such as the San Bernardino shooting). Anyone have any insight as to whether the underlying encryption has an affect on those attack vectors?

For many years, the file system has been encrypted with 256 bit keys, and different keys per file. (I know this is supposedly an advantage of the new filesystem, but that's been there for years). And 256 bit means: Forget it.

The only way to read the files on an iPhone is to enter the right passcode. There's just no way around that. Now the problem was people using 4 digit passcodes (10,000 possible codes). Apple adds some security by adding delays when you enter the wrong passcode more than 6 times, which means if I have your 4 digit passcode locked phone, I can't unlock it in a day with some patience but it could take years. The FBI paid someone to get around this; I think they could check 6 passcodes in 90 seconds or something like that, which makes 4 digits crackable. The methods used don't work on iPhone 6, iPhone 7, or iPhone 5s and 5se.

Mass bricking and data loss imminent

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't trust Apple with your data. I expect to make a bundle with data recovery requests.

Obligatory XKCD

[Scarred Intellect]

https://xkcd.com/927/

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

Nor obligatory, not relevant. Apple wasn't trying to unify anything, it was purely interested in its own ecosystem.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

The dipshits that ruin Slashdot by posting examples of that painfully awkward and unfunny comic don't care if it's relevant or not, they just have terrible taste and want the world to know.

Re:Don't blame a filesystem for your lack of backu

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but it IS the filesystems fault for corrupting itself no? Nowhere did he say he blamed his harddrive or ssd, he blamed the filesystem. A valid complaint, so dont try to hand wave it away by blaming it on lack of backups.

APFS is modern?

[darkpixel2k]

Apple is Upgrading Millions of iOS Devices To a New Modern File System Today

Sweet. Maybe I'll purchase some Apple crap now...

a new file system -- called the Apple File System (APFS)

Wait. I thought you said a 'modern file system'. You know....like ZFS.

Re: APFS is modern?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, zfs! I remember it corrupting all my file systems while I was a university student. Maybe it was the Linux implementation, I don't know, but I'm never touching that fs again.
Also my NAS corrupted its file system more recently and guess which fs it was?

Re:APFS is modern?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/20...

Re: APFS is modern?

[darkpixel2k]

Oh, zfs! I remember it corrupting all my file systems while I was a university student. Maybe it was the Linux implementation, I don't know, but I'm never touching that fs again. Also my NAS corrupted its file system more recently and guess which fs it was?

I have been running ZFS for ~5 years now across ~40 servers. Never failed once.

I even had one particular server with 8 drives in a RAIDZ2 lose a drive while two others started failing. I replaced them all successfully. Less than 12 hours later two additional drives failed and a third started acting flakey. I replaced them all successfully. No data loss. I'll trust AUFS when I see it handle weird hardware BS like that.

Re: APFS is modern?

[Anonymous Coward]

Been running it with FreeNAS for over a year on recommended hardware - Intel Xeon, 16GB ECC RAM, directly attached (No RAID controllers) HDDs. No problems.

Re: APFS is modern?

[fnj]

I'll second the observation. I have found ZFS (on both FreeBSD and linux) to be phenomenally reliable through several years. I have no worry at all when power failure hits my 75 TB worth of RAID-Z2 and RAID-Z3 storage pools using a total of 25 drives. I don't even bother with a UPS. Disclaimer - my pools are only occasionally written to; mostly read.

Re:APFS is modern?

[TheFakeTimCook]

Apple is Upgrading Millions of iOS Devices To a New Modern File System Today

Sweet. Maybe I'll purchase some Apple crap now...

a new file system -- called the Apple File System (APFS)

Wait. I thought you said a 'modern file system'. You know....like ZFS.

Well, since APFS has been in development for only a year or so, and ZFS is like 10 years old at this point, I'd say that APFS is the more "modern" FS.

Re: APFS is modern?

[TheFakeTimCook]

Oh, zfs! I remember it corrupting all my file systems while I was a university student. Maybe it was the Linux implementation, I don't know, but I'm never touching that fs again.
Also my NAS corrupted its file system more recently and guess which fs it was?

I have been running ZFS for ~5 years now across ~40 servers. Never failed once.

And I have run HFS and HFS+ since 1984 or '85, on several dozen machines. Never failed once.

Now what?

Re:APFS is modern?

[Anubis IV]

Wait. I thought you said a 'modern file system'. You know....like ZFS.

You need to recalibrate your sense of time. APFS was announced last year and launched today. ZFS has been around for a decade or so at this point. I'd wager you couldn't name a production-ready filesystem intended for widespread use that's newer than APFS without doing a search for one.

To be clear, I have no problem with ZFS. It has its shortcomings and strengths, just like anything else. I'm considering using it with a NAS I'm looking at putting together (via UnRAID). But this suggestion that APFS isn't "modern" is preposterous, given that it's a ground-up filesystem written in the last few years, taking into account the strengths and drawbacks of most other recent filesystems.

Re:APFS is modern?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are confusing "new" with "modern". APFS may be an improvement on HFS, but Apple's choice to exclude end to end checksums was extremely foolish. At the bare minimum, a modern filesystem should guarantee the integrity of the data it stores. History teaches us that every layer of the storage stack is capable of corrupting data, and this corruption will propagate to backups if not detected. Every other filesystem designed since ZFS has taken this lesson to heart.

Re: APFS is modern?

[darkpixel2k]

my 75 TB worth of RAID-Z2 and RAID-Z3 storage pools

My God! It's full of porn!

Re: APFS is modern?

[darkpixel2k]

And I have run HFS and HFS+ since 1984 or '85, on several dozen machines. Never failed once.

Now what?

Have you recovered 100% of your data from a 6 our of 10 drives failing within a 48 hours window?

Can you yank the drives out of one machine, put them into a pile, and then randomly plug them into another machine and access your data?

Can you do that while the OS is running?

How about in the middle of writing data?

Without running chkdsk or fsck?

Re:APFS is modern?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple uses premium storage media. It doesn't need to waste CPU cycles on stuff like that.

Re: APFS is modern?

[darkpixel2k]

And I have run HFS and HFS+ since 1984 or '85, on several dozen machines. Never failed once.

Now what?

From wikipedia:

Apple File System uses checksums to ensure data integrity for metadata, but not user data.

I'm glad ZFS cares about the integrity of *my* data, not just its metadata.

Re: APFS is modern?

[TheFakeTimCook]

And I have run HFS and HFS+ since 1984 or '85, on several dozen machines. Never failed once.

Now what?

Have you recovered 100% of your data from a 6 our of 10 drives failing within a 48 hours window?

Can you yank the drives out of one machine, put them into a pile, and then randomly plug them into another machine and access your data?

Can you do that while the OS is running?

How about in the middle of writing data?

Without running chkdsk or fsck?

Can you boot from your ZFS drives?

Re:APFS is modern?

[paulhar]

CPU (especially for operations like XOR for checksumming) is basically free.

'Premium storage media'. I've worked for vendors in the enterprise storage space for the past 17 years or so. Even the most expensive drives still fail in spectacular ways, from the oops (you asked to write to block 64 but it actually wrote to block 2048, but only 1/billion operations, and that's silent corruption) to the catastrophic (flying height issues, bearing issues, oil issues).

SSDs, while much better, also have software (firmware) bugs and also media issues. Trusting the media is a bad idea.

Re:APFS is modern?

[flargleblarg]

Well, since APFS has been in development for only a year or so ...

Uh, actually, AFPS has been in development for several years.

Re: APFS is modern?

[darkpixel2k]

Can you boot from your ZFS drives?

Yes. Is there some reason I shouldn't be able to?

Re:APFS is modern?

[Anubis IV]

Every other filesystem designed since ZFS has taken this lesson to heart.

So, I take it you're unaware of ext4? It's arguably the most wide-used filesystem designed since ZFS, but it doesn't support the end-to-end checksums you're talking about.

Re:APFS is modern?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google posted a blog about SSDs vs spinning rust, and they say on average, SSDs can write as much data as spinning rust before failure, but SSDs are overall 1/2 as likely to fail in their work loads. The main difference if you can write data much faster to SSDs causing them to fail faster relative to a wall-clock but not faster relative to data written.

Re: APFS is modern?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only can FreeBSD boot from a ZFS volume, but it can snapshot the boot volume, mount it in a Jail, run an OS upgrade in the Jail, point the bootloader to the new volume. Even roll-back if something actually went wrong.

Re:APFS is modern?

[TheFakeTimCook]

Well, since APFS has been in development for only a year or so ...

Uh, actually, AFPS has been in development for several years.

Citation, please?

Re: APFS is modern?

[TheFakeTimCook]

Can you boot from your ZFS drives?

Yes. Is there some reason I shouldn't be able to?

News to me. When did they get that working?

That was one of the main reasons that Apple didn't adopt it back in the Leopard days, when they had that experimental ZFS driver running.

Re: APFS is modern?

[darkpixel2k]

News to me. When did they get that working?

That was one of the main reasons that Apple didn't adopt it back in the Leopard days, when they had that experimental ZFS driver running.

Not sure if you missed my original post or what...but I don't use Apple crap *because* of the brain-damaged 'features'. Like APFS. I use ZFS on FreeBSD and occasionally Linux. Booting works fine from both, although FreeBSD has a nice polished installer to do it for you. In Linux it's a very manual process to set it up. As for ZFS on Apple? I have no clue. In two decades I only ever had one client that absolutely couldn't be switched from Apple to FreeBSD or Linux to achieve better results.

Re:APFS is modern?

[flargleblarg]

Look it up. It's been widely known (and reported here 3 years ago) that Apple was working on a new filesystem.

Re: APFS is modern?

[TheFakeTimCook]

News to me. When did they get that working?

That was one of the main reasons that Apple didn't adopt it back in the Leopard days, when they had that experimental ZFS driver running.

Not sure if you missed my original post or what...but I don't use Apple crap *because* of the brain-damaged 'features'. Like APFS. I use ZFS on FreeBSD and occasionally Linux. Booting works fine from both, although FreeBSD has a nice polished installer to do it for you. In Linux it's a very manual process to set it up. As for ZFS on Apple? I have no clue. In two decades I only ever had one client that absolutely couldn't be switched from Apple to FreeBSD or Linux to achieve better results.

Well, I was simply asking when the ZFS folks got booting working, because it used to be a problem IIRC.

But since you can't hold a rational discourse with spewing Apple Hate, I guess we're done here.

Re: APFS is modern?

[darkpixel2k]

Well, I was simply asking when the ZFS folks got booting working, because it used to be a problem IIRC.

It's been working fine on FreeBSD and Linux.

But since you can't hold a rational discourse with spewing Apple Hate, I guess we're done here.

Yeah, I hate apple. I have good reason to. I just listed one--they went with their own shit-tastic filesystem and last time I checked, they aren't open enough to boot from ZFS.

It may surprise you, but my work computer is a piece-of-shit Macbook Pro. I am forced to use it by policy. It's *terrible*. If I don't fit the 'Apple mold' and just use brain-dead point-and-click applications all day, I end up with segfaults, performance problems, and out-of-memory issues. Hell--vim segfaults 2-3 times per hour on my Macbook. I've never seen that on Linux or FreeBSD. I measure my Macbook uptime in hours, my Linux uptime in months, and my FreeBSD uptime in years.

So yeah--I have a *lot* of hate for Apple products. All it took was using a Macbook Pro for ~3 months in my life, and a newly issued iPhone S (for evaluating an iOS app) for the last week. You might not like the hate, but it's absolutely justified hate. And since this is about filesystems and Apple just released a product that screams "we wanted ZFS, but not-invented-here" that doesn't checksum user data...well...one more reason to hate Apple products.

Re: APFS is modern?

[TheFakeTimCook]

Well, I was simply asking when the ZFS folks got booting working, because it used to be a problem IIRC.

It's been working fine on FreeBSD and Linux.

But since you can't hold a rational discourse with spewing Apple Hate, I guess we're done here.

Yeah, I hate apple. I have good reason to. I just listed one--they went with their own shit-tastic filesystem and last time I checked, they aren't open enough to boot from ZFS.

It may surprise you, but my work computer is a piece-of-shit Macbook Pro. I am forced to use it by policy. It's *terrible*. If I don't fit the 'Apple mold' and just use brain-dead point-and-click applications all day, I end up with segfaults, performance problems, and out-of-memory issues. Hell--vim segfaults 2-3 times per hour on my Macbook. I've never seen that on Linux or FreeBSD. I measure my Macbook uptime in hours, my Linux uptime in months, and my FreeBSD uptime in years.

So yeah--I have a *lot* of hate for Apple products. All it took was using a Macbook Pro for ~3 months in my life, and a newly issued iPhone S (for evaluating an iOS app) for the last week. You might not like the hate, but it's absolutely justified hate. And since this is about filesystems and Apple just released a product that screams "we wanted ZFS, but not-invented-here" that doesn't checksum user data...well...one more reason to hate Apple products.

You've got something hardware-related wrong with that MacBook.

I have had exactly ONE Kernel Panic (what you are incorrectly calling a "Seg-fault") in my years of running OS X/macOS (and that started with OS X 10.0.0; so MANY years), and that was some Freeware "scanner driver" that was a POS. An Unhandled Interrupt if I had to guess.

The only other time I had KPs (and a LOT of them!) was when I bought some dodgy memory for a G5 tower that wasn't up to spec. Hardware Test figured that one out. I replaced the RAM, and not one other KP, ever.

And before you say that is because all I use are "approved", "safe" applications, then perhaps you should look to the quality of the APPLICATIONS, and stop blaming the PLATFORM. If you search for "vim crash os x", you will find a long and storied history of that simple Editor being an unstable POS. Don't think it's the Mac's fault. It's a fucking EDITOR, FFS! Just one that has an issue that no one has bothered to track down and fix.

Howabout you?

Re: APFS is modern?

[darkpixel2k]

You've got something hardware-related wrong with that MacBook.

Apple's own diagnostics tools say the hard drive and memory are fine.

Apple's own techs (the company shipped it off to Apple) say it's fine.

I have had exactly ONE Kernel Panic (what you are incorrectly calling a "Seg-fault")

Nope. I'm not incorrect. The kernel has never panic'd on my Macbook. But lots of applications (like 'vim') will suddenly dump me back to the command line with a segfault message.

And before you say that is because all I use are "approved", "safe" applications, then perhaps you should look to the quality of the APPLICATIONS, and stop blaming the PLATFORM. If you search for "vim crash os x", you will find a long and storied history of that simple Editor being an unstable POS. Don't think it's the Mac's fault. It's a fucking EDITOR, FFS!

Weird. Vim workes perfectly for me on Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows. No crashes. Must just be a Mac thing.

Anyways, the Mac may be perfect for you. It's definitely not for me. Ignoring the constant crashing for a moment, nothing is more intuitive to me than having to remember CTRL+T opens a new tab on Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows...but for the elitist Mac platform I have to shift my finger over and hit APPLE+T.

Or how about Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows using the home/end keys go to the beginning and end of a line. But the elitist Mac platform scrolls to the beginning and end of a browser window, document, etc...

Or how about the weird Mac Mail issues where it absolutely refuses to show the status of a SMIME signed or encrypted message?

Or how about turning on an Android phone without a SIM card and being able to instantly begin to use it for developing apps? But the elitist Mac platform absolutely requires you to activate the iPhone with a SIM card, followed by the requirement to set up a valid credit card before installing a *free* application from their store.

How about deploying tablets to fire, EMS, or police vehicles? With Google you simply sign up for Google Apps by entering some basic information, then provisioning the tablets. Done. In about 45 minutes. But the elitist Apple platform requires you to set up an account for volume purchasing. Oh, you already had an iTunes account? Sorry, that won't work. Create a new e-mail address and a new account. Then wait for all sorts of business verification (like your DUNS number) before you get access to an account that appears to have the sole purpose of issuing a signing certificate and allowing you to authorize other accounts (don't use existing ones!) to sign in to the tablets. Then buy a Mac Mini, buy the $20 OSX server software, start to configure it---oops, there's an update to the OS. Upgrade and find all your server shit broken. Oh, and by the way, you have to re-buy the *new* server software for the newly upgraded OS. Then try to fix it. After 9 months of having various Apple 'professionals' stumble around and not be able to deploy it, I spend two weeks during business hours using Apple Support to get it working. After throwing away and re-creating 20 iCloud accounts because Apple couldn't delete them or change them to the right type so it can participate in their VPP program. Screw that mess.

So once again, yeah, I have a *lot* of Apple hate. It's a toy OS for people who don't have to do anything more complicated than check e-mail and browse the web in a *very* playskool "my first computer"-type interface.

...but I will say one nice thing about Apple...they do appear to take user privacy *very* seriously when compared to Microsoft and Google. If they could just fix their retarded interface and brain-damaged ideas about doing thing 'differently' for the sole purpose of appearing different than Microsoft...I would consider buying it.

Pretty soon no more system RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

See my subject & mark my words - it's ALL going to be diskbound but SSD ram diskbound that saves state & loads fast.

* REMEMBER I SAID THAT...

APK

P.S.=> It takes out a WHOLE LAYER of overheads (yes, SSD (for now) is SLOWER than system RAM, but not for long) of the File Open/Read-Write/Close-Flush cycles OFF DISK into RAM - you get disk as fast as RAM, especially when it saves state on disk? You don't NEED system RAM... apk

In-place File System conversion?

[Anonymous Coward]

... let the bricking begin.

Re:In-place File System conversion?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm performing the update right now... ( after a full backup )
I'll let you know how it goes. I seem to be a brick magnet. I've had my phone bricked 3 times over the years ( iPhone 4, 4s, and 6 )
I normaly wait at least 48 hours for the "oh shit we found a bug" recalls, but this time I'm too much of a sucker X-D

Re:Don't blame a filesystem for your lack of backu

[omnichad]

Even if you don't lose data, you still lose uptime. Backups are only one layer.

i just lost all my porn

[known_coward_69]

I will never forgive you apple

Re:i just lost all my porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Do not worry, you can download it all again from this website.

Re:i just lost all my porn

[Anonymous Coward]

But hey, they did just free all that space for new porn!

Re:i just lost all my porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Liar, everybody knows you can't put porn in apple devices

You might want to restate...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that argument once again, when you're not so quite drunk.

NTFS, Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yippee!

Google?

[fieldstone]

Maybe one of these years they will finally move to F2FS as the default for mobile devices. Apple finally added a new feature before Android had it.

Re:Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty sure iOS had the whole 'multitouch UI paradigm' before Androd.

Re:Google?

[TheFakeTimCook]

Maybe one of these years they will finally move to F2FS as the default for mobile devices. Apple finally added a new feature before Android had it.

Finally?

You better go recheck your history, bub!

Finder app comeing?

[Joe_Dragon]

Finder app comeing?

Re:Don't blame a filesystem for your lack of backu

[DontBeAMoran]

What do you mean? Onion or cake layers?

Re:Don't blame a filesystem for your lack of backu

[omnichad]

The non-analogy type.

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been posting with the 10.3 beta for months.

Re:Nope

[fyngyrz]

Is this the OS that won't run 32-bit apps?

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

But you were not first

I'll probably skip this version too

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't plan on upgrading my iOS until they roll back the changes they made to email threads. The latest versions I literally can't follow what is happening in an email thread... why they felt the need to 'fix' something that wasn't broken is beyond me.

What's does it really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an iPad 2 which still works great. Since there is no fucking way for me to directly interact with the file system, what does it matter.? I can't plug a USB stick or MMC card into it. If I want to load a movie on to my iPad I've got to jump through obstacles and hoops to do it. When this bitch dies, it's going to be time for a Samsung or whatever. Anything but a control freak Apple piece of shit.

Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like it has some of the features of ZFS without being full blown ZFS. Sounds Apple-ly.

No overwrite

[DrYak]

In other words, it functions the same way as copy-on-write filesystems such as Btrfs and ZFS, or log-structured filesystems such a various flash-oriented systems (F2FS and the likes) or as the venerable UDF.

Or thank you apple for finally having a filesystem that is not decades out-dated, but finally joining the club of other modern Unices.

I am just wondering why they needed to re-invent their own wheel, instead of opting for re-using ZFS.

Re:No overwrite

[Anonymous Coward]

I am just wondering why they needed to re-invent their own wheel, instead of opting for re-using ZFS.

Because they work like shit on a phone, an even more so on a watch? And why have FAT on them instead? Do you love FAT so much even though it's really outdated?

self corruption preventing

[DrYak]

No, but it IS the filesystems fault for corrupting itself no?

File systems with a lesser tendency to corrupt themselves :
file systems that do not over-write themselves.

such as Copy-on-Write filesystems (Btrfs, Zfs, etc.) and Log-structured filesystems (F2FS, UDF, etc.)

according to source, APFS is also going to be copy-on-write, making it similarly more resilient to corruption.

(if system crashes or loses power mid-write, you don't end-up with a corrupted file system.
You end up with the previous version of the filesystem, plus new copies of data that may or may not be corrupted.
For those copies which are corrupted, you can trivially revert to previous copy)

Late to the dance?

[hduff]

I believe we have had those devices for some time now.

Another copy on write FS

[thogard]

A major problem with copy on write is that users can not scrub their data and that has to be done by a root user.

The Posix committee needs to get its act together and provide a F_OVERWRITE fcntl system call that says "when I write a block back to the disk for this file, put it in the same place".

As an example of why this is needed:
echo "123SomeMagic" >file
echo "XYZZY123" >file
grep "123SomeMagic" /dev/sda
You get the same results if you do a open, write, sync, seek 0, write.

dd if=/dev/zero of=file&rm zero; won't even scrub the data off the disk most of the time with ZFS, APFS or BTRFS. Encryption won't help either since the OS will happily give you a bunch of unencrypted blocks if you have the right privilege levels.

Re:Another copy on write FS

[0123456]

Since the filesystem is designed for SSDs, it will presumably TRIM the freed blocks, and automatically wipe the data.

If not, I believe it's encrypted by default anyway, so finding old encrypted blocks won't do you much good.

Re:Another copy on write FS

[thogard]

The raw block device will give you decrypted blocks on all 3 of the file systems mentioned. Doesn't anyone test this stuff anymore?

I'm giving it some time

[movdqa]

Worst case - I lose all of my data I think. I'll give it a week or two.

TFFS

[Anonymous Coward]

Reads like Timmy's Fuck'n File System.

Now all the porn shit on iCloud (HFS/HFS+) will be unreadable! Perfect solution to "encryption" in Timmy's Dime-Store Mind from KKK south Alabama.

Ha ha

Re:Don't blame a filesystem for your lack of backu

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh... so, parfait it is.

Caution

[AdamAnderson8866]

Here be dragons... XIIV

Re:Don't blame a filesystem for your lack of backu

[Waccoon]

If a filesystem is crap, I think I'll still blame the filesystem, thank you.

Re:Don't blame a filesystem for your lack of backu

[michael_wojcik]

Onion or cake layers?

What do you have against brick?

Re:Don't blame a filesystem for your lack of backu

[Lost Race]

No matter how good your backups are, filesystem corruption still sucks. It's a failure mode that's basically impossible to detect and recover from automatically. I've never seen a filesystem corruption that wasted less than an hour of sysadmin time.

can i still back up my ios files/photos to linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

i use linux to back up my ios devices' photos and other stuff .. will that still work? i.e. does that read the filesystem directly or does it use some sort of file sharing protocol (e.g. nfs) that allows the ios device to present the same info to linux even if the filesystem format has changed.

Won't this force a reformat?

[nhat11]

I can't see the average person wanting to reformat just to upgrade unless there's something I'm don't know.