Apple's Policy on Apple File System (APFS) for High Sierra

[dasboot5]

So I hate to beat a dead horse, and we know many have already installed this in beta form, but these are my questions?
1. If you have an INTERNAL Mac SSD and a Win10 internal SSD if the Windows Side is disconnected during the install or upgrade obviously no conversion can take place then. Is it attacked by High Sierra, after?
2.If you use NTFS for Mac will it still not take place?
3. If you have a real Mac and have boot camp installed does the NTFS formatting still takes place on top of APFS with a clean Windows install? or is the Windows OS installed on a custom formatted partition?
4. What does it do to Linux derivative drives / formatting?
Not everyone uses one OS to get their work done.

 

[vulgo]

So I hate to beat a dead horse, and we know many have already installed this in beta form, but these are my questions

If you upgrade a GPT HFS+ macOS partition on an SSD the default behavior is that partition is converted to a single APFS container. An APFS container, (in ways) like corestorage/LLVM can contain multiple 'synthesised' volumes. In the default scenario you still have your single GPT partition, now an APFS container, that contains root disk, recovery disk and helper volumes(s). Other drives and GPT partitions are not converted.

Potential problems: At the moment APFS container partitions cannot be read from Windows (edit: but see next post) or Linux. HFS+ specific apps e.g. Disk Warrior won't work on APFS. Backing up: The way (a real mac's) firmware determines whether a partition contains a bootable OS has changed, and Apple hasn't released all the details. The data from an APFS volume could occupy more space than the same sized volume or partition of a non-APFS type.

 

[RehabMan]

If you upgrade a GPT HFS+ macOS partition on an SSD the default behavior is that partition is converted to a single APFS container. An APFS container, (in a way) like corestorage/LLVM can contain multiple 'synthesised' volumes. In the default scenario you still have your single GPT partition, now an APFS container, that contains root disk, recovery disk and helper volumes(s). Other drives and GPT partitions are not converted.

Potential problems: APFS container partitions cannot be read from Windows or Linux. HFS+ specific apps e.g. Disk Warrior won't work on APFS. The way (a real mac's) firmware determines whether a partition contains a bootable OS has changed, and Apple hasn't released all the details.

I wonder if Apple will be releasing APFS drivers for Windows as part of a new BootCamp.

If not, users that have Windows on their Mac and expect to access the data they have on the Mac side (read only) like they used to with HFS+ and the HFS+ BootCamp drivers for Windows will be in for a surprise. It will be an especially big surprise given that the HS installer is upgrading solid state boot volumes to APFS without warning.

 

[tabarus]

is it possible to start conversion to APFS later as well?

Lets say I install High Sierra on a HDD, later I clone the HDD to an SSD.
Would it be possible to convert the Filesystem to APFS ?

 

[RJM_Peters]

I have 2 partitions on my SSD, first with macOS, second with User data.
When I do a update to High Sierra what will happen to the second partition with the User folder data,
will the second partition also be converted to APFS ?

 

[aol]

So forgive this noob question. I have Sierra installed on an SSD, no separate data drive. If I attempt an in place upgrade to High Sierra my machine won't boot?

It will boot if you use the latest clover (anything since 4128 or so works but to be safe use the latest 4200 or higher) and make sure you have apfs.efi in your clover/EFI/drivers64UEFI or appropriate place for your system. Be aware that as of the latest 4200 clover it can not mount the EFI partition, so you would ideally get this sorted out before you upgrade to High Sierra. The EFI partition will survive the apfs conversion. You can pull apfs.efi out of the High Sierra installer, threads on the forum tell you how to extract a copy from either the installer pkg or post-install (but you want it before you install). @RehabMan has a GitHub fork of clover which is able to mount and install clover to efi, FYI. I assume SF clover will fix this issue at some point.

That said the kexts and things have changed between Sierra and High Sierra and you may need to worry about the details of your config.plist and the kexts you've installed. Generic stuff like ethernet drivers should be fine but if you've hand made config.plist edits or ssdt.amls, they may not work under High Sierra. Review the changes you've made for your system.

p.s. still not Nvidia web drivers. Hope they come out soon after 9/25.

 

[Macboy123]

Is there already a debugless version of apfs.efi or a clover switch to disable debug output ?

 

[Stork]

Other World Computing's Blog has a "translation" of information in the Apple Support Document: Translating Apple’s New High Sierra & APFS Compatibility Document.

 

[thedocbwarren]

Very interesting. I am still curious on the "internal boot drive" label. External ssd and such I assume doesn't get automatically converted?

Either way I'm waiting for a while as stated before.

Other World Computing's Blog has a "translation" of information in the Apple Support Document: Translating Apple’s New High Sierra & APFS Compatibility Document.

 

[MysticalOS]

It's already caught up. They already merged in APFS mounting 9 days ago in official repo (https://sourceforge.net/p/cloverefiboot/code/4208/), and tagged a new release 4220 with these changes and others. 4220 looks pretty solid. Rehab has merged in the EDK fixes and such too and brought his fork up to 4220 as well when I looked, so either works.

of course like hfsplus.efi, apfs.efi is not included with clover, so you have to get that on own.

Although it's probably better to just stay on HFS+ for time being as that's what all experts recommend. there are ways to make installer not auto convert (well if those still hold true in release version anyways)