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A Closed-Source Apple File-System APFS Driver For Linux Announced

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  • #21
    Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
    Me neither, but there are quite a bit of "external hard drives for mac" formatted with their fs and costing 100$ more than a normal hard drive.
    Why would you charge standard market rates when Mac users will gladly pay an extra hundred? In fact, they might avoid your product if you didn't charge them an extra hundred, thinking it's probably not Apple-y enough.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by andyprough View Post
      Maybe I'm in the minority, but I can't imagine ever having to read from or write to an Apple-formatted disk. Never had to mount an HFS or HFS+ disk. I don't recall anyone ever doing work on a Mac and passing it to me on a specially formatted drive. Don't all the Mac folks just use FAT32 on their thumb drives?
      No problem. Imagine Macbook user with Linux and macOS dualboot.

      Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
      AFAIK the newer ones should have NTFS read-only drivers at least. For writing yes you need a driver. Some time ago (2014?) they had an experimental NTFS read-only driver, which was disabled by default.
      MacOS has readonly NTFS support since 10.2 (year 2002). And since 10.6 you could enable native write capabilities at yours own risk.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by garegin View Post
        can you use APFS on spinning drives? As far as I looked up, you can't. Is this something in the works? BTW, kudos to Apple to ditching HFS+, it was a REALLY bad FS.
        Apple doesn't officially support it but it works and I've done it. The difference on that hardware between HFS+ and APFS seemed to be negligible. The difference between a spinning platter drive and an SSD to an operating system is essentially nil, I'm sure you could put F2FS on a spinning platter drive if for some reason you wanted to.

        HFS wasn't really bad when it was developed, and HFS+ was a reasonable evolution, but that was almost 20 years ago.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by CTown View Post

          I believe Mac folks tend to use exfat on their thumb drives. This lets it the thumbdrive to work on more computers/devices than HFS+ and allows bigger files than fat32.
          I just plugged in a wiped 64GB flash drive to a Mac running 10.13 and the first option it gave me for formatting was, perhaps unsurprisingly, HFS+. FAT was actually on the list above exFAT. I don't know why any sane person would want a 64GB flash drive with a filesystem that can't handle single files larger than 4GB, but that's still generally how they come formatted from the factory.

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          • #25
            Originally posted by FireBurn View Post
            How can they make this an in-kernel driver and not have it be GPL?
            They use an LGPL shim in the middle, that is tolerated by the kernel devs.

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            • #26
              I'd question how useful this is for support purposes. It's not like anybody can rescue a Mac nowadays with the soldered down SSD. And I'm not sure if today's Macs still have the 'Boot as storage disk' mode in UEFI.

              You'd first have to do a disk dump or image into a spare SATA HDD or SATA/m.2 socketed SSD, then perform a rescue on that disk.And most imaging tools won't allow imaging to be carried out if the source storage device was corrupted or damaged.

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              • #27
                I hope a "SamsungGate" (I invented a term for the exFAT native driver code leak) happens again: A code leak happens and their code contains GPL code

                Really, Paragon are a bunch of nasty bastards from Russia that came to Germany with stolen code: If you know the PTS-DOS history, you'll be really sure about it.

                Originally posted by geearf View Post

                They use an LGPL shim in the middle, that is tolerated by the kernel devs.
                It's really stupid that is tolerated, but well. Anyway, not all kernel developers agree on that stuff and many are against that.

                Originally posted by Sonadow View Post
                I'd question how useful this is for support purposes. It's not like anybody can rescue a Mac nowadays with the soldered down SSD. And I'm not sure if today's Macs still have the 'Boot as storage disk' mode in UEFI.

                You'd first have to do a disk dump or image into a spare SATA HDD or SATA/m.2 socketed SSD, then perform a rescue on that disk.And most imaging tools won't allow imaging to be carried out if the source storage device was corrupted or damaged.
                About the soldered down SSDs: I agree, that's nasty and a total mess.

                About the imaging tools: What about GNU ddrescue?
                Last edited by timofonic; 01 December 2017, 05:28 PM.

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                • #28
                  Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
                  Mac folks use whatever is default filesystem on average. Any thumbdrive less than 32GB is Fat32, and quite frankly I never saw Mac users needing much more space than that in an external drive.

                  (some had a NAS though)
                  Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
                  Mac folks use whatever is default filesystem on average. Any thumbdrive less than 32GB is Fat32, and quite frankly I never saw Mac users needing much more space than that in an external drive.

                  (some had a NAS though)

                  I stand corrected. I'm just surprised considering Mac OS has great support for exfat right out of the box.

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                  • #29
                    Originally posted by CTown View Post




                    I stand corrected. I'm just surprised considering Mac OS has great support for exfat right out of the box.
                    Maybe they paid the Microsoft "tax". You maybe know the reason of Apple existence is to justify there's no monopoly in computing. Apple is a premium market like the jewelry one, with tons of overrated thinking about their products by certain people. They exist just because Microsoft needs them, they would have disappeared ages ago with tons of their fiascos.

                    Despite Microsoft's inefficiency, their extreme brute force power can destroy whatever company/corporation they want to. Don't underestimate them, that's something very stupid to do. Don't underestimate Apple too and beware of things like CUPS progressive privatization, they are also part of "the dark side" just like Google and most tech companies worldwide...
                    Last edited by timofonic; 02 December 2017, 04:05 PM.

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                    • #30
                      "Separately, I haven't seen any open-source initiatives yet come up about trying to fully reverse engineer APFS"

                      Reverse engineering only tells you how the data structure are currently being used, it says nothing about the intent of the structure moving forward. As a result, several results from reverse engineering contain magic numbers where it isn't clear why those magic numbers/strings are used in the data structure but it is required to maintain compatibility. Given that Apple has already stated in their APFS Guide FAQ that they plan to publish the APFS volume format specification, it is probably best to wait for that to be released. Following specifications from the original authors can result in better quality code which can retain better forward compatibility.

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