7 ms·

As a counterpoint, APFS was deployed to almost a billion devices over the span of several months when it was release and, IIRC, this is the first major issue.

Gaelan 9y ago
There was the password vs password hint thing.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
  Which was a bug in Disk Utility, not APFS.
  - Gaelan 9y ago
    Right, my bad.
nnutter 9y ago
Some of the upgrades to High Sierra in my company failed and left the laptop unbootable. Unfortunately, I wasn't involved in the repair so I only have been told it was due to the APFS conversion and that the solution was to wipe and install.
StillBored 9y ago
How do you know that? Filesystem corruption is frequently silent, and every-time it happens customers don't get on the phone and send the disks to apple so that they can root cause the problem. Its quite possible this bug has happened an untold number of times before it happened to someone who went through the effort to reproduce and isolate it.
- freehunter 9y ago
  >How do you know that? Can you point to any other APFS issues that were reported before this one?
  - jandrese 9y ago
    My wife's laptop suddenly decided that the boot drive was corrupt a few weeks after she updated to APFS. None of the recovery tools were of any use. We had to reinstall the OS and pull the files from a backup. This story did not make it to Hacker News.
    - zbentley 9y ago
      Anecdata != filesystem issue. If you have more information about the problem you encountered and how it implicates/interacts with APFS, please do link to it. Otherwise, bug reports via circumstantial evidence are, while not inherently false, certainly suspect.
      - stanmancan 9y ago
        I'm not sure they're implying that it -was- an APFS issue, just that in the majority of circumstances users won't go through the same level as effort to diagnose an issue as in the article. Instead of pulling drives and trying to reproduce the error, they just wiped the drive and started fresh. I could be wrong, but I believe the point is not that it did happen, but that this -could- have happened many times in the past and users just format/re-install without thinking about it.
        StillBored 9y ago
        The hardware is likely being blamed for a lot of failures that are software related. Its almost assured there is a software problem in cases where reinstalling the machine fixes the problem. A random machine which won't boot due to disk/filesystem failures could be a hardware issue, but that is pretty much ruled out if reinstalling/reformatting doesn't immediately manifest in further failure. Bit rot, stuck bits, bad links are a thing, but they generally show up as massive soft error correction long before it reaches the point of simply being unable to read the sector and when that happens the OS will almost always tell you that the sector can't be read rather than giving you garbage data. That is because the likelyhood of undetected hardware failures given the layers and layers of ECC on the disks, links/etc manifesting itself as filesystem meta data failures rather than garbage in the middle of video/images/document streams/etc is really unlikely. Or the more likely case of the machine performance degrading due to read retry/ecc correction/retransmission making the machine appear to have severe performance issues long before it manifests as silent data corruption sufficient to eat the filesystem structure (its a fun excise to intentionally flip a few random bits on a hard-drive image (or in RAM)) and see if/when they are detected. So, yes the first thing I think when I hear filesystem corruption is BUG! That is what the experience of tracking down a number of incidents in a large data storage application a few years ago taught me.
jarym 9y ago
I'd point out it was deployed to iPhones - devices where the underlying physical disk won't get smaller so this bug would not have appeared. iOS devices are extremely constrained in a number of ways that MacOS isn't - who knows how many other bugs have failed to surface because Apple thought their iOS test was a 'job done' moment.
gumby 9y ago
Not contradicting you but this makes me wonder if writable disk images are used at all behind the scenes in iOS.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dreamcompiler 9y ago
As far as you know. File systems fall into the category of software where a bug can have disastrous consequences. Even if the probability of a bug is small, the magnitude of the consequence means that the overall risk is still high. And the current quality of software coming from Apple is so bad that the probability is not low. For myself, I'm not letting APFS near my systems for at least a couple more years.
loeg 9y ago
Yeah. Frankly, the APFS rollout was incredibly smooth for a new filesystem.
ghostcluster 9y ago
It irrecoverably destroyed my partition on upgrade to High Sierra.
trynewideas 9y ago
for a sufficiently narrow definition of "major issue" that excludes - the encryption password hint leak ("that was Disk Utility, not APFS") - APFS volume erasure issues ("also Disk Utility") - Adobe, Unity (editor and games built with it), Steam, Source Engine, and FCPX crash, performance, and asset loss issues on APFS volumes, all of which went away when moved to HFS+ volumes ("those teams should have adapted their software during beta") - performance and incompatibility issues with spinning-disk drives ("platters are bad, APFS is designed for SSDs") - RAID kernel panics, even on supported RAID 0 configurations ("that's corecrypto, not APFS")
- djsumdog 9y ago
  There were multiple unicode issues on APFS reported here on HN, but I think those were before it went live.
gruez 9y ago
refs (microsoft's new filesystem)'s deployment went along much better. i haven't heard of any major issues since it came out in windows server 2012.
- dpkonofa 9y ago
  ReFS was only ever made the default on new installs of Windows Server 2012. It never actually made it to production builds of Windows 8 or above so it's actually only installed on a fraction of the systems that are out there. That's not really a sufficient sampling size to say that this deployment went along much better. The APFS update was a much, much larger endeavor and, based only on public response, was nearly seamless. This is the first major issue I've heard about with regard to APFS.
  - sebazzz 9y ago
    ReFS was not the default FS on Windows Server 2012, for many reasons, but one being that you cannot boot from it [1]. [1]: http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/windows-server-2012/refs-what-you-need-know-about-resilient-file-system-part1.html http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/windows-...
  - minusf 9y ago
    yes, huge deploy but not that seamless. 1. i had a filevault related corruption issue, the disk was eating itself up thinking it was encrypting... don't have the apple discussion link at hand. 2. time machine hidden snapshot, "disk full" issues. it's a major pita for me that is not possible to turn off local snapshots.
    - PhantomGremlin 9y ago
      it's a major pita for me that is not possible to turn off local snapshots. Try this terminal command: sudo tmutil disablelocal Edit: I'm still on Sierra. Someone else mentioned that HS removed that. But also pointed to: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/solution-reclaim-storage-back-from-system.2073174/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/solution-reclaim-storag... Good luck!

Gaelan 9y ago

There was the password vs password hint thing.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
Which was a bug in Disk Utility, not APFS.
- Gaelan 9y ago
  Right, my bad.

nnutter 9y ago

Some of the upgrades to High Sierra in my company failed and left the laptop unbootable. Unfortunately, I wasn't involved in the repair so I only have been told it was due to the APFS conversion and that the solution was to wipe and install.

StillBored 9y ago

How do you know that? Filesystem corruption is frequently silent, and every-time it happens customers don't get on the phone and send the disks to apple so that they can root cause the problem. Its quite possible this bug has happened an untold number of times before it happened to someone who went through the effort to reproduce and isolate it.

freehunter 9y ago
>How do you know that? Can you point to any other APFS issues that were reported before this one?
- jandrese 9y ago
  My wife's laptop suddenly decided that the boot drive was corrupt a few weeks after she updated to APFS. None of the recovery tools were of any use. We had to reinstall the OS and pull the files from a backup. This story did not make it to Hacker News.
  - zbentley 9y ago
    Anecdata != filesystem issue. If you have more information about the problem you encountered and how it implicates/interacts with APFS, please do link to it. Otherwise, bug reports via circumstantial evidence are, while not inherently false, certainly suspect.
    - stanmancan 9y ago
      I'm not sure they're implying that it -was- an APFS issue, just that in the majority of circumstances users won't go through the same level as effort to diagnose an issue as in the article. Instead of pulling drives and trying to reproduce the error, they just wiped the drive and started fresh. I could be wrong, but I believe the point is not that it did happen, but that this -could- have happened many times in the past and users just format/re-install without thinking about it.
      - StillBored 9y ago
        The hardware is likely being blamed for a lot of failures that are software related. Its almost assured there is a software problem in cases where reinstalling the machine fixes the problem. A random machine which won't boot due to disk/filesystem failures could be a hardware issue, but that is pretty much ruled out if reinstalling/reformatting doesn't immediately manifest in further failure. Bit rot, stuck bits, bad links are a thing, but they generally show up as massive soft error correction long before it reaches the point of simply being unable to read the sector and when that happens the OS will almost always tell you that the sector can't be read rather than giving you garbage data. That is because the likelyhood of undetected hardware failures given the layers and layers of ECC on the disks, links/etc manifesting itself as filesystem meta data failures rather than garbage in the middle of video/images/document streams/etc is really unlikely. Or the more likely case of the machine performance degrading due to read retry/ecc correction/retransmission making the machine appear to have severe performance issues long before it manifests as silent data corruption sufficient to eat the filesystem structure (its a fun excise to intentionally flip a few random bits on a hard-drive image (or in RAM)) and see if/when they are detected. So, yes the first thing I think when I hear filesystem corruption is BUG! That is what the experience of tracking down a number of incidents in a large data storage application a few years ago taught me.

jarym 9y ago

I'd point out it was deployed to iPhones - devices where the underlying physical disk won't get smaller so this bug would not have appeared. iOS devices are extremely constrained in a number of ways that MacOS isn't - who knows how many other bugs have failed to surface because Apple thought their iOS test was a 'job done' moment.

gumby 9y ago

Not contradicting you but this makes me wonder if writable disk images are used at all behind the scenes in iOS.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dreamcompiler 9y ago

As far as you know. File systems fall into the category of software where a bug can have disastrous consequences. Even if the probability of a bug is small, the magnitude of the consequence means that the overall risk is still high. And the current quality of software coming from Apple is so bad that the probability is not low. For myself, I'm not letting APFS near my systems for at least a couple more years.

loeg 9y ago

Yeah. Frankly, the APFS rollout was incredibly smooth for a new filesystem.

ghostcluster 9y ago

It irrecoverably destroyed my partition on upgrade to High Sierra.

trynewideas 9y ago

for a sufficiently narrow definition of "major issue" that excludes - the encryption password hint leak ("that was Disk Utility, not APFS") - APFS volume erasure issues ("also Disk Utility") - Adobe, Unity (editor and games built with it), Steam, Source Engine, and FCPX crash, performance, and asset loss issues on APFS volumes, all of which went away when moved to HFS+ volumes ("those teams should have adapted their software during beta") - performance and incompatibility issues with spinning-disk drives ("platters are bad, APFS is designed for SSDs") - RAID kernel panics, even on supported RAID 0 configurations ("that's corecrypto, not APFS")

djsumdog 9y ago
There were multiple unicode issues on APFS reported here on HN, but I think those were before it went live.

gruez 9y ago

refs (microsoft's new filesystem)'s deployment went along much better. i haven't heard of any major issues since it came out in windows server 2012.

dpkonofa 9y ago
ReFS was only ever made the default on new installs of Windows Server 2012. It never actually made it to production builds of Windows 8 or above so it's actually only installed on a fraction of the systems that are out there. That's not really a sufficient sampling size to say that this deployment went along much better. The APFS update was a much, much larger endeavor and, based only on public response, was nearly seamless. This is the first major issue I've heard about with regard to APFS.
- sebazzz 9y ago
  ReFS was not the default FS on Windows Server 2012, for many reasons, but one being that you cannot boot from it [1]. [1]: http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/windows-server-2012/refs-what-you-need-know-about-resilient-file-system-part1.html http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/windows-...
- minusf 9y ago
  yes, huge deploy but not that seamless. 1. i had a filevault related corruption issue, the disk was eating itself up thinking it was encrypting... don't have the apple discussion link at hand. 2. time machine hidden snapshot, "disk full" issues. it's a major pita for me that is not possible to turn off local snapshots.
  - PhantomGremlin 9y ago
    it's a major pita for me that is not possible to turn off local snapshots. Try this terminal command: sudo tmutil disablelocal Edit: I'm still on Sierra. Someone else mentioned that HS removed that. But also pointed to: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/solution-reclaim-storage-back-from-system.2073174/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/solution-reclaim-storag... Good luck!