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This article describes a new disk image format (on which a filesystem can be put, APFS in the article), not a filesystem, or did I misunderstand? edit: added t
by jraph 1y ago
This article describes a new disk image format (on which a filesystem can be put, APFS in the article), not a filesystem, or did I misunderstand?
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.
- crazygringo 1y agoThis is a new disk image format. Not even a disk format. For virtualizing a disk. 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.
- hulitu 1y ago> For virtualizing a disk. We really don't have enough disk formats in this space. Is this bringing something new ? Or is just polluting the namespace.
- coldtea 1y ago>Is this bringing something new? If only there was a whole post available so one could find out...
- Dylan16807 1y agoThe post only benchmarks against UDIF. Whether this brings something new is a very good question that is not answered by the post. 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.
- sitkack 1y agoJust reading the title, I was like, I hope it is an update to encrypted sparse bundles, and it is. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vzdiskimagestoragedeviceattachment/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vzd...
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoYes, its going to be similar to a .dmg file on the Mac.
- pmarreck 1y agoOnly Mac users IMHO are well-familiar with working with disk images. They are not as diverse or well-supported on other OS’es, while nearly every Mac app (prior to the App Store) was installed by dragging it out of a mounted disk image.
- kccqzy 1y agoYeah and OP was asking, why was effort spent on a disk image format rather than a file system. Seems like a reasonable question to ask.
- zymhan 1y agoNot any more reasonable than asking why they added new transparency effects instead of btrfs support
- kccqzy 1y agoThat's of course also a reasonable question to ask! We all hope by asking these questions some Apple employee using a throwaway account will provide an answer on HN. HN is that magical place where such questions have the best chance of getting answered.
- jraph 1y agoI don't think the question would make much sense. Why did Apple do X and not Y (unrelated to X) is not an interesting question. It would seem close to whataboutism. They were willing to spend money on X. They are not willing to spend money on Y. Or, they didn't think about doing Y. Or, they needed X. They haven't needed Y. Apple want fast VMs and also they haven't needed Btrfs. What insight can you get? There's no relation between the two. You'd get the same insight by asking "Why didn't Apple implement Btrfs?", but by linking the two in the same question, you are kinda implying there's a link. 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.