Comment by lucasoshiro

>3rd party supporting a file system would be one of the last things on a list of all software I’d ever want a 3rd party writing instead of the OS maker.

Given how many people use FUSE, Paragon NTFS for Mac, and similar tools, you're hardly totally representative.

That being said: FSKit is a userspace API. In that respect, it's a lot better than filesystem code running in the kernel - it can't crash your computer or corrupt data on other filesystems, and it's much more tightly sandboxed if it gets exploited.

What would Apple's incentive be to support Btrfs, Ext4, XFS or ZFS ?

Btrfs, Ext4 and XFS are all under GPLv3, which may or may not be a problem for Apple, but "just in case".

They tried with ZFS, but couldn't strike a deal with Sun/Oracle, so instead invented APFS.

Apple already delivers a stable filesystem. It may not be "best of breed", but it works, as billions of devices runs on it every day with zero problems.

Question, who maintains NTFS support for Linux? Microsoft? The kernel? The distros? Genuinely asking.

I'd be happy for VeraCrypt not to have to rely on MacFuse which requires I go turn off some very low-level protection to even use. It sounds like this makes that possible.

I don't really understand your objection to be honest. Drivers for storage are common on other platforms

Only 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.

Just 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/vzd...

Yes, its going to be similar to a .dmg file on the Mac.

> 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.

Not any more reasonable than asking why they added new transparency effects instead of btrfs support

I 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.

I think UDF was meant to be this, though I don't think it supports everything you'd want. Does NTFS have licensing issues though?

zfs?

xfs.

if GPL is a non-starter for you, youre missing the point of the open standard. apple already discloses a litany of various GPL it ships. XFS would be no different.

I intentionally excluded unofficial or third party software, as almost anything is supported if you’re brave enough. The quality of said drivers also wildly varies.

Until 4 years ago, nothing was good enough for the upstream Linux kernel.

Does this even matter, if you can copy/mount files over a network?

What are potential use cases where you'd want to support those additional file systems? External drives?

Even FreeBSD can't be bothered to do a good job supporting Linux file systems. They're basically proprietary siloed file systems like the rest, even if code is available. Linux, meanwhile, can't be bothered to support either of FreeBSD's file systems officially. UFS2 is hardly patented anymore, but Linux doesn't care beyond read-only support.

Being open-source, and even being in a popular open-source project, does not make a standard, or even imply inferiority to those who do not implement it.

https://xkcd.com/927/

A. You're flagged for graphic, inappropriate, and triggering language.

B. Oracle sued Google for a decade over whether a minor number of APIs were copyrighted in Java; do you think Apple's eager to embrace their technology regardless of license? Heck, even Ubuntu wasn't willing to make that bet.

C. Guess how much official licenses for those fancy file systems cost.

D. ZFS, and other fancy file systems, are not known for low RAM and CPU usage. In a server, this does not matter; but it's pretty important for anything on a battery.

Let me clarify, I don't expect two vendors like that to merge filesystem specs. I just think they should have first-class support for reading and writing on each others' default (NTFS and APFS) filesystems because the alternative is that a user who has a hard drive full of their important documents can't switch between Mac and PC without buying 100% more storage with which to do a complicated filesystem-migration exercise -- and let's be honest, only an absolute nerd (like us) would even understand what that is. Others would just plug in the NTFS disk to the Mac, see the popup saying "unreadable," shrug and give up (or worst case, format it not understanding that means erasing).

This is the kind of thing a reasonable government would just tell them they had to do by virtue of being a fully locked-in duopoly, just like they should tell Apple and Google that users should be able to choose to install an alternat app store.