I skimmed through the article, but I have a question that I hope someone can answer. I have a sparse disk image created on a NAS (which runs Linux), and I use it to backup some stuff (not a VM) from the Mac in the native format (the macOS APFS file system).
Would this new format, ASIF, make this faster and better whenever I switch to macOS Tahoe? I hope there wouldn’t be any gotchas with respect to storing this disk image on a NAS.
What blew my mind recently was that I could store an APFS sparsebundle on a NAS drive, then mount it over NFS and use it as a plain old APFS volume. Despite the filesystem layering, it works pretty much like a local volume, albeit with a bit of performance degradation. Seems preferable to something like iSCSI for using APFS with network storage.
I have a meta question not directly related to the article but more about HN itself. I posted this exact link 9h before this submission was posted[1]. How is it possible that there is a new entry for the submission given the link is the same?
It's a shame that every new cool product/dataformat/cable/cpu/whatever researched by Apple has very little (or no) public documentation. Sure, there are lots of hackers who can test and reverse engineer those pretty quickly, but it's just unnecessary work. I don't know why Apple is so revered in hacker circles, to be honest. Not even Microsoft does this shit anymore, they're open sourcing a lot of research this decade, but they're still seen with extreme distrust. Whereas Apple was always secretive and used underhanded tactics, but it is still loved.
macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format
(eclecticlight.co)367 points by zdw 12 June 2025 | 134 comments
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I guess this is the Apple version of qcow2 and friends
Would this new format, ASIF, make this faster and better whenever I switch to macOS Tahoe? I hope there wouldn’t be any gotchas with respect to storing this disk image on a NAS.
Perhaps this new format would work even better?
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=eclecticlight.co