5 ms·

Epicenter of change? HFS+ has been the epicenter of unintentional change, right? Finally they'll start rolling out a next-generation file system: block level ch

Epicenter of change? HFS+ has been the epicenter of unintentional change, right? Finally they'll start rolling out a next-generation file system: block level checksumming, snapshots, copy-on-write, ... HFS+ should just go away and die...

xutopia 12y ago
Whenever there is a thread about Apple development someone pipes up and says that HFS+ is horrible. Can you explain why it's so problematic? I never once thought to myself that the filesystem needed an update. Ok maybe the .DStore files piss me off but I'm not even sure a filesystem change could change that.
- sangnoir 12y ago
  > Whenever there is a thread about Apple development someone pipes up and says that HFS+ is horrible. Can you explain why it's so problematic? I never once thought to myself that the filesystem needed an update. Ok maybe the .DStore files piss me off but I'm not even sure a filesystem change could change that. I'm not OP, but Linus had a rant in a Google+ comment on where he laid out his problems with HFS+[1]. John Siracusa also chimed in with a link to a section of an Ars Technica post he made titled 'What's wrong with HFS+'[2]. Linus' complaints seem to center around Case insensitivity and Inadequate Unicode Normalization in HFS. The Ars review is more damning (accusations include: undermining data integrity, metadata locks meaning only one process can update the FS at a time, etc) However, I'm not a FS expert so I am likely not doing the views justice: I encourage you to click through to the source URLs below. 1. https://plus.google.com/+JunioCHamano/posts/1Bpaj3e3Rru https://plus.google.com/+JunioCHamano/posts/1Bpaj3e3Rru 2. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/#hfs-problems http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/#hfs-p...
- QuantumRoar 12y ago
  It happens rarely, but it happened to me already. Imagine you saved a file and backed it up. At some point (which is basically a question of time) your file gets corrupted. You don't notice it since you don't touch that file very often. After a year or so, you try to open it and it fails. Then you go to your backup only to notice that the corrupted file has been overwriting your original file and the deletion of older backups resulted in your original file being long gone. Maybe you have a second backup? Have you ever had the opportunity to see a "slightly" broken hard drive continuously changing all your stuff by just a little bit? Somebody's to blame, right? Well, yeah, basically it's the file system's highest priority not to break your data. And, of course, to tell you when your data broke. HFS+ is just not capable of doing that. Then there's such things as RAID mirroring which really only makes sense if you know which blocks are the correct ones and which are the broken ones. The second major thing I'd really like to have are Snapshots. There's not much to be said here except that I'd really like to easily create a snapshot of the state of a disk. Roll back easily, setup your new computer without hassle. Time Machine Backups kind of tries to do that, but it's (in my opinion) a real pain, although it does some things that are useful. What Time Machine tries to do, is essentially to emulate a feature that should really be part of the file system. There's been a lot of progress on file systems but HFS+ is kind of stuck. HFS+ is basically an age-old thing that doesn't really have any more capabilities than back in the glorious Mac OS 8 days (Journaling was added sometime later), except that ever more stuff is put on top of it instead of improving the file system itself. Also, I really dislike the default being case-insensitive and case-preserving (apparently things break if you make it case-sensitive) but maybe that's just me. If you ever get the chance, try reading up on ZFS (or give it a try with, say, FreeBSD on a server). ZFS basically shows the capability of a modern file system.
  - yuhong 12y ago
    I think it is mostly Carbon apps that break with case sensitivity.
    - plorkyeran 12y ago
      A lot of more recent OS X apps break with case sensitivity simply because they've never been tested with it. The fixes are nearly always completely trivial, but they still have to be done.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Whenever there is a thread about Apple development someone pipes up and says that HFS+ is horrible. Can you explain why it's so problematic? It's because of herd mentality. Other people say it, so they must indulge too. Besides they've heard about this ZFS and how awesome it is, so it should be used everywhere, even in laptops where it has no real business purpose (as an enterprise FS), and will consume CPU and thus battery life and eat into the valuabe SSD space. It's like when fresh CS students learn about this assembly thing and how it's the lowest and faster layer, and then want to have whole OSes written in hand-rolled assembly because that will be the "fastest OS ever".
  - smackfu 12y ago
    Is it a herd mentality if smart people on file systems say HFS+ sucks, and other people believe them? Because that's pretty much the case. If the herd follows the experts, that's a good thing, right?
  - xj9 12y ago
    To be honest, HFS+ does suck, and I'd like to see OS X default to something better. I'm a big fan of ZFS (it backs all of our production machines), but it does seem like overkill for a desktop OS. Something like HAMMER or btrfs might be a better fit.

xutopia 12y ago

Whenever there is a thread about Apple development someone pipes up and says that HFS+ is horrible. Can you explain why it's so problematic? I never once thought to myself that the filesystem needed an update. Ok maybe the .DStore files piss me off but I'm not even sure a filesystem change could change that.

sangnoir 12y ago
> Whenever there is a thread about Apple development someone pipes up and says that HFS+ is horrible. Can you explain why it's so problematic? I never once thought to myself that the filesystem needed an update. Ok maybe the .DStore files piss me off but I'm not even sure a filesystem change could change that. I'm not OP, but Linus had a rant in a Google+ comment on where he laid out his problems with HFS+[1]. John Siracusa also chimed in with a link to a section of an Ars Technica post he made titled 'What's wrong with HFS+'[2]. Linus' complaints seem to center around Case insensitivity and Inadequate Unicode Normalization in HFS. The Ars review is more damning (accusations include: undermining data integrity, metadata locks meaning only one process can update the FS at a time, etc) However, I'm not a FS expert so I am likely not doing the views justice: I encourage you to click through to the source URLs below. 1. https://plus.google.com/+JunioCHamano/posts/1Bpaj3e3Rru https://plus.google.com/+JunioCHamano/posts/1Bpaj3e3Rru 2. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/#hfs-problems http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/#hfs-p...
QuantumRoar 12y ago
It happens rarely, but it happened to me already. Imagine you saved a file and backed it up. At some point (which is basically a question of time) your file gets corrupted. You don't notice it since you don't touch that file very often. After a year or so, you try to open it and it fails. Then you go to your backup only to notice that the corrupted file has been overwriting your original file and the deletion of older backups resulted in your original file being long gone. Maybe you have a second backup? Have you ever had the opportunity to see a "slightly" broken hard drive continuously changing all your stuff by just a little bit? Somebody's to blame, right? Well, yeah, basically it's the file system's highest priority not to break your data. And, of course, to tell you when your data broke. HFS+ is just not capable of doing that. Then there's such things as RAID mirroring which really only makes sense if you know which blocks are the correct ones and which are the broken ones. The second major thing I'd really like to have are Snapshots. There's not much to be said here except that I'd really like to easily create a snapshot of the state of a disk. Roll back easily, setup your new computer without hassle. Time Machine Backups kind of tries to do that, but it's (in my opinion) a real pain, although it does some things that are useful. What Time Machine tries to do, is essentially to emulate a feature that should really be part of the file system. There's been a lot of progress on file systems but HFS+ is kind of stuck. HFS+ is basically an age-old thing that doesn't really have any more capabilities than back in the glorious Mac OS 8 days (Journaling was added sometime later), except that ever more stuff is put on top of it instead of improving the file system itself. Also, I really dislike the default being case-insensitive and case-preserving (apparently things break if you make it case-sensitive) but maybe that's just me. If you ever get the chance, try reading up on ZFS (or give it a try with, say, FreeBSD on a server). ZFS basically shows the capability of a modern file system.
- yuhong 12y ago
  I think it is mostly Carbon apps that break with case sensitivity.
  - plorkyeran 12y ago
    A lot of more recent OS X apps break with case sensitivity simply because they've never been tested with it. The fixes are nearly always completely trivial, but they still have to be done.
coldtea 12y ago
>Whenever there is a thread about Apple development someone pipes up and says that HFS+ is horrible. Can you explain why it's so problematic? It's because of herd mentality. Other people say it, so they must indulge too. Besides they've heard about this ZFS and how awesome it is, so it should be used everywhere, even in laptops where it has no real business purpose (as an enterprise FS), and will consume CPU and thus battery life and eat into the valuabe SSD space. It's like when fresh CS students learn about this assembly thing and how it's the lowest and faster layer, and then want to have whole OSes written in hand-rolled assembly because that will be the "fastest OS ever".
- smackfu 12y ago
  Is it a herd mentality if smart people on file systems say HFS+ sucks, and other people believe them? Because that's pretty much the case. If the herd follows the experts, that's a good thing, right?
- xj9 12y ago
  To be honest, HFS+ does suck, and I'd like to see OS X default to something better. I'm a big fan of ZFS (it backs all of our production machines), but it does seem like overkill for a desktop OS. Something like HAMMER or btrfs might be a better fit.