[Analemma_]

HFS+ isn't so much "crazy" as it is "really friggin old". It's not much more than a coat of paint on top of HFS, which was introduced in 1985 (!), and thus is missing out on the last three decades of filesystem research.

I might be too optimistic, but I've been assuming that Apple started development on a replacement for HFS+ as soon as the ZFS deal collapsed. I know that was years ago, but filsystems take a looooong time to get right. It's coming, guys, I promise!

[gherkin0]

> HFS+ isn't so much "crazy" as it is "really friggin old".

Exactly. It was also developed for an entirely different non-UNIX operating system. Resource forks were really important and commonly used and understood in Classic Mac OS.

The only crazy thing about the situation is that Apple hasn't made a more typical UNIX filesystem as the default since they retired the Classic environment. What's even crazier is that they used to support one (UFS) but removed that support in Leopard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_File_System

[lukifer]

My hunch is that they've got something brewing that is optimized for a post-SATA, SSD-only world, and they won't release it until that describes most/all of their product line.

[mappu]

F2FS or YAFFS2 would be cool replacements.

[arthurfm]

Is it possible that Apple are waiting until all of their computers have 100% flash storage before switching to a new file-system?

[oblio]

I hope you're not right. There are so many wonderful filesystems already out there, many of them already Open Source.

I'm not against research, but I'd rather have Apple fund one of these existing efforts.

[bydo]

Which? Apple won't adopt anything GPL, so BTRFS, XFS, JFS, etc--basically every Linux project is right out. It was almost ZFS, years ago, but Apple backed out when Oracle bought Sun. What out there is modern, good, and under a compatible license? HAMMER?

[deftnerd]

They could probably buy up the rights to BeFS for really cheap now. It was a beautiful file system, in my opinion.

[chipotle_coyote]

IIRC, they hired Dominic Giampaolo to work on the file system for a while -- he was responsible for adding journaling to HFS+ and started Spotlight, which has a lot in common with BeFS's attributes. He apparently worked on a new file system for them but it never shipped.

http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/

[grubles]

btrfs, zfs, and any other checksumming FS is useless without ECC RAM.

[the_why_of_y]

Not any more useless than any other (non-checksumming) filesystem.

[jedisct1]

HAMMER2