Apple APFS, a new filesystem with some ZFS features

[gea]

Beside the established new generation filesystems like NetApp Wafl and ZFS and those that are inspired from ZFS like btrfs or ReFS there is a new filesystem from Apple on the horizon: APFS, that includes some features of ZFS like CopyOnWrite but lacks others like checksums on data. This is similar to the default in ReFS but there you can manually enable data checksumming.

Adam Leventhal, one of the developer of Dtrace at Sun has published a blog serie that is worth reading. He looked at aspects like filechecks options an data integrity on the filesystem level compared to ECC RAM or checksums on disks, snapshots and backups.

Adam Leventhal's blog » APFS in Detail: Data Integrity

 

[capn_pineapple]

I've been reading about this.

Yet another thing for Apple to mess up, next to their farce of an SMB stack.

 

[MiniKnight]

I don't get why they did this rather than just use some standard that's out there.

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

I don't get why they did this rather than just use some standard that's out there.

Control, plus their desire to have the same FS across many classes of devices I think. Most other filesystems would be too heavyweight for phones and even then many have spotty or tacked-on support for transparent encryption, and a great deal of them are under licenses/companies that won't get along well with apple I don't think. About the closest in terms of features and a compatible license would be hammer I think, although I doubt it's far enough along to be considered mature.

FYI they ran a condensed version of Adam's postings over at Ars::
A ZFS developer’s analysis of the good and bad in Apple’s new APFS file system

 

[gigatexal]

Everything I have read says people are fairly confident that checksums are coming to the FS

 

[cperalt1]

Yes to checksums but probably like in ZFS were certain features are enabled via feature flags