Mac OS X Lion Roundup: Recovery Partitions, TRIM, Core 2 Duo Minimum, Security Focus

[AidenShaw]

"historically" is the important word

Windows PCs historically have been unable to boot from an external drive.

And "historically" Windows PCs could only use 16-bit processors.

Almost any system from the last 5 years can boot from USB (rotating media, solid state media, flash thumb drives, DVD, ...).

Want to boot/install Windows from a USB thumbdrive - just reformat the thumbdrive as FAT32, mark the partition as "active", then drag-and-drop the files from the DVD to the thumbdrive. Boot. (Note that the full graphical recovery environment is bootable from the thumbdrive or DVD.) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd535816.aspx

 

[Tonepoet]

Dropping legacy support sucks, esp in quick cycles but that's kinda the way of computing. Apple tries to be nice by offering a transitionary stage for people with legacy software though. Things like FAT, Carbon, Universal binaries and Rosetta gives developers a reason to program for the lowest common denominator, while allowing Apple to move on without too much of a burden on their shoulder with low system requirements necessitating a less powerful operating system and likewise more architectures to support means less optimization, optimization which should be key to the sort of hardware restricted support Apple provides. It's a bit of a tradeoff. I wonder just how power hungry could Lion be though?

Oh well, there's still always Linux for those older computers I guess.

Of course not every Mac user is going to have an extra HD around that just so happens to have an extra version of the system on it. But your point does stand. With Apples eventual move to SSD and removal of the ODD it would seem like the recovery partition is a way to not have to include a USB key with every Mac (as that is potentially expensive for little return).

That could be part of what the move to SDs card slot on most of the unibody Macbook Pros and all of the recent iMacs is for, as it'd be much easier to package and possibly somewhat cheaper pendent on their needs. Granted, it still wouldn't be as nearly as cheap as the optical media was to begin with but it can't really be helped, since if there's a problem with my the way my internal drive is formatted, I might not even be able to access my media. Just maybe Apple stands more to gain from preventing unnecessary service calls and expensive warranty service repairs than saving a buck on the included media? I've got no clue myself.

As for the models that don't currently have SD cards, you need to fill the optical disc drive space with something for it to be useful and SD card readers still wouldn't take up nearly as much space as the ODD it'd replace.

Isn't SATA III supported in OS X 10.6 on the new 2011 MBPs? You need to have Sandy Bridge (or later) hardware, so currently the only Macs with SATA III are the new 2011 MBPs.

I'm not sure. I just went to the apple store, I think just the day before yesterday to check the system profiler and make sure they were using SATA III connections since I might want to upgrade to a better SSD than the BTO offering sometime later down the road. Both the 13" and the 17" I was looking at reported the link speed for the hard drive was 6 Gbps, the negotiated link speed was 3.0 Gbps, albeit that was for the stock 5400 RPM rotational hard drive. I wouldn't have thought that sorta thing would be affected by the O.S. per se, since the connector has to even if the O.S. is uninstalled but I could very easily be wrong about that.

 

[King Flamez1]

Agreed

Nice to see Apple copying Windows' good ideas.




LOL for all the posts claiming that TRIM wasn't needed.




Not pathetic - smart. All Lion systems will be x64 systems. Developers won't have to worry about the tiny fraction of Intel Apples that are x86-only.

If you look my history of posting, you'll see that I've said

• Apple should have skipped Yonah (Core and Core Duo) and waited for Merom (Core 2) several months later. I said this before the first Yonah systems were released.
• I said that Apple should have dropped x86 in Apple OSX 10.6 - and made that release x64-only.

32-bit is dead. Windows Server doesn't support 32-bit, and the next version of Windows client won't support 32-bit. Apple is doing everyone a favor by simplifying Lion.

I totally agree with the awesomeness of Apple getting rid of 32-bit. Much needed

 

[PurrBall]

I'm not sure. I just went to the apple store, I think just the day before yesterday to check the system profiler and make sure they were using SATA III connections since I might want to upgrade to a better SSD than the BTO offering sometime later down the road. Both the 13" and the 17" I was looking at reported the link speed for the hard drive was 6 Gbps, the negotiated link speed was 3.0 Gbps, albeit that was for the stock 5400 RPM rotational hard drive. I wouldn't have thought that sorta thing would be affected by the O.S. per se, since the connector has to even if the O.S. is uninstalled but I could very easily be wrong about that.

Probably because the hard drive itself isn't capable of 6 Gbps.

 

[karsten]

I haven't done anything heavy with it yet but at least Safari eats even more RAM than it used to! Currently eating 1.5GB of my 4GB Kernel takes a bit more RAM as well.

i'm hoping it's the debug code cause they sure haven't seemed to do anything about the safari memory problem

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

By supporting the old stuff, they would need to support 32 bit systems. This would degrade overall performance by forcing Apple to spend programming time on old hardware that few people use.

If you think they are not still supporting 32-bit programming in Lion, you're utterly and totally clueless about Lion. Apple hasn't even bothered to offer a 64-bit Carbon Free iTunes for OSX let alone fully eliminate Carbon from their own software. They're too busy being hypocrites and trying to cash in on iPhones to actually be consistent about their own operating system. What ever happened to resolution independence in OSX? We were supposed to get that in Leopard (parts of it were even in Tiger). It's not even going to be in Lion, three "major" versions later. Every move Apple makes now is based on one thing and one thing alone...greed.

If Apple really cared about being the best desktop operating system out there (as in in reality, not in their propaganda), they would have been concentrating on the features they need to stay in the game. Here's just a small list of REAL improvements they could have made by now and won't bother:

* Resolution Independence (finish the darn thing already!)

* Latest OpenGL (not versions from 2+ years ago)

* Keep the darn video card drivers updated or let/pay someone else to do it! Even on the same hardware running the same game, Windows always runs games much faster between the crappy/outdated video drivers and outdated OpenGL and general lack of support for game developers by Apple. Support all the hardware features of the cards as well (it's pathetic that I get full H264 hardware decoding support in Windows on my 2008 MBP, but not in OSX! Even Intel integrated Netbooks have video hardware assist, letting them run HD video that much faster Macs with the same chip set couldn't hope to run in OSX).

* Support USB3 in OSX (at least 3rd parties could offer it more easily even if Apple doesn't give a darn about its customers needs)

* Update or replace the HFS+ File System (it's getting long in the tooth; if not ZFS, roll their own)

* Improve Dual Monitor Support (you cannot even disable the 2nd monitor from software and having to move the mouse to another monitor just to access the application menu is downright STUPID and should have been addressed 8+ years ago. Just being able to have a menu for each screen would have sufficed. Offering docks across both monitors could be useful too. OSX's multiple monitor support is just plain SAD compared to Windows or even Linux).

That is why they are the best revisions. Software developers need to get away from piling on new features and put more effort into making their new software leaner, faster and more reliable as well as less exploitable. The first step in doing this is to cut everything you can out.

And yet Snow Leopard runs SLOWER than Leopard. So much for your "leaner, faster" NONSENSE about cutting everything out being the greatest thing ever for Apple to do. It's easy to delete support for older machines in a money grab effort to force upgrades, but a little more difficult to make OSX truly world class. But in a world where a good chunk of the Mac user base are fanatical, they think everything Steve does is perfect. Some of us, though, don't care about Apple or Steve personally and just want a good product.

 

[RalfTheDog]

If you think they are not still supporting 32-bit programming in Lion, you're utterly and totally clueless about Lion. Apple hasn't even bothered to offer a 64-bit Carbon Free iTunes for OSX let alone fully eliminate Carbon from their own software. They're too busy being hypocrites and trying to cash in on iPhones to actually be consistent about their own operating system.

It is not about converting everything to 64 bit, it is about not creating two versions of every new application. If you have leagacy software that is coded in 32 bits and does not need to access big memory, there is no reason to expend programmer time that would be better used elsewhere.

If you are writing from scratch, You are better off just writing 64 bit code.

What ever happened to resolution independence in OSX? We were supposed to get that in Leopard (parts of it were even in Tiger). It's not even going to be in Lion, three "major" versions later. Every move Apple makes now is based on one thing and one thing alone...greed.

Resolution independence does not work all that well. It is good for things like vector based fonts, but it stinks for bitmaps.

And yet Snow Leopard runs SLOWER than Leopard. So much for your "leaner, faster" NONSENSE about cutting everything out being the greatest thing ever for Apple to do.

The reason for any slowdown is related to data streaming and protection from hackers. The old way to deal with streaming input was fast, just create a buffer the size of the data you want, then dump the data to the buffer. Unfortunately this lets a data source present a false size, then dump far more data than the buffer can handle. (Sorry about the buffer handle joke.) The solution is to:

Create the buffer, then read the data into the buffer one bite at a time. After each bite, you check to see if the stream has ended or if the buffer is full. If either condition is true, end the stream and either go on about your business or return an error. Good programming is not always fast programming. (This was an oversimplification, but you get the idea.)

Every bit (pun not intended) of legacy code you keep in an OS is a potential intrusion point. If you are a responsible developer, you strip every bit of it you can.

 

[AidenShaw]

Resolution independence does not work all that well. It is good for things like vector based fonts, but it stinks for bitmaps.

Sounds like a fail for the OS for trying to use bitmaps instead of vector images.

Fix the OS, don't say "resolution independence does not work".

 

[Fraaaa]

If Apple deserves criticism on this front, it should be for not following through with the delivery of the OS, applications, and recovery software on a USB stick like they did with the MBA.

I wonder if they are ever going to in-build a small flash drive inside the logic board to install/restore the OS instead of using the USB.

 

[John.B]

Of course not every Mac user is going to have an extra HD around that just so happens to have an extra version of the system on it. But your point does stand. With Apples eventual move to SSD and removal of the ODD it would seem like the recovery partition is a way to not have to include a USB key with every Mac (as that is potentially expensive for little return).

All true, but with a FireWire cable you could boot a MBP with a suspected dead hard drive from my mini or whatever I happened to have handy.

I do agree that the USB key for installation and recovery media is the right answer going forward.

And "historically" Windows PCs could only use 16-bit processors.

Almost any system from the last 5 years can boot from USB (rotating media, solid state media, flash thumb drives, DVD, ...).

Want to boot/install Windows from a USB thumbdrive - just reformat the thumbdrive as FAT32, mark the partition as "active", then drag-and-drop the files from the DVD to the thumbdrive. Boot. (Note that the full graphical recovery environment is bootable from the thumbdrive or DVD.) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd535816.aspx

But, unless something has changed recently, you couldn't completely clone your disk as a backup/recovery tool, then just boot from the clone. Say you wanted to test a service pack upgrade with your existing software. AFAIK, you'd still have to do an installation of Windows before you could start the complete restore. Even Ghost makes you copy all the data back as opposed to just booting from the other drive.

And if Microsoft has fixed that recently, then I'd congratulate them on having some fine photocopiers.

Comparing external drive booting to "recovery partitions", I'd give the nod to Apple's original solution over the Microsoft workaround.

 

[Fraaaa]

Still 32-bit.

That's gold!

 

[johnnyturbouk]

lions is truly roaring onto the scene
(sorry corny line-lol)

trim is welcomed - as for support for apple ssds only-this sucks

air-drop for file transfer sounds hot- but hope this extends to iphones/ipads for simple files transfers - im really getting annoyed with having to use ssh.. its useful but apple need to get a grip... maybe allow to set-up iphone/ipads in simple/expert mode - the expert mode being a hybrid JB idevice/android
this would make a lot more sense, a lot more people happy - and most consumers will be still safe - but as it may dig into profits i doubt this would ever happen

 

[AidenShaw]

simply wrong

But, unless something has changed recently, you couldn't completely clone your disk as a backup/recovery tool, then just boot from the clone.

You're simply wrong here.

Last fall I upgraded the HDD in my Lenovo T61p (almost 4 years old) from 100 GB to 500 GB. I pulled the 100 GB out, installed the 500 GB, put the 100 GB in a cheap SATA-USB 2.5 case (Buffalo MiniStation), booted the clone software from a USB thumbdrive, and copied all the data.

Rebooted.

WTF - I still only saw 100 GB! It took less than a minute of poking around in diskmgmt to realize that the ThinkPad had booted from the USB MiniStation instead of the internal SATA drive. To boot from the thumbdrive, I had set USB to have a higher boot priority. Although I'd pulled out the thumbdrive, the USB HDD had higher priority, and I booted from that.

You'll get a lot more traction bashing Windows if you at least use facts in your statements. Or maybe you consider summer 2007 to be "recent".

But "historically" you're right, Windows 3.1 couldn't boot from a USB hard drive. But then, Apple OS7 couldn't use target disk mode - so it's a wash historically.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

All true, but with a FireWire cable you could boot a MBP with a suspected dead hard drive from my mini or whatever I happened to have handy.

I do agree that the USB key for installation and recovery media is the right answer going forward.


But, unless something has changed recently, you couldn't completely clone your disk as a backup/recovery tool, then just boot from the clone. Say you wanted to test a service pack upgrade with your existing software. AFAIK, you'd still have to do an installation of Windows before you could start the complete restore. Even Ghost makes you copy all the data back as opposed to just booting from the other drive.

And if Microsoft has fixed that recently, then I'd congratulate them on having some fine photocopiers.

Comparing external drive booting to "recovery partitions", I'd give the nod to Apple's original solution over the Microsoft workaround.

Here is some infomation for you. MS can not do anything about boot from USB. That was NEVER and I REPEAT never a MS issue. That was a hardware manufacture issue that needed to be addressed in either the the BIOS or EFI depending on which one that was being used.
MS has no control over the BIOS. The BIOS/EFI's job is to start the basic checks for the hardware and then look for boot file on a drive somewhere.
Normally goes in this order
A:, D: C: drive. Checks each one out. USB can be added to the list and owner just has to tell it want to do.
MS has no control beyond that.

 

[bozz2006]

I'm (sort of) nervously/anxiously waiting for confirmation that Lion works on the original mac pro. if not, it may be time for me to sell it an move on. At this point in time, I don't need Pro power anymore. It would be great if the Mini got "i" processors, that would fit me just fine.

 

[pr5owner]

Oh god not a recovery partition. That's one of the things I love that a Mac DOESN'T have.....

why even care? the first thing you should do when you get a new laptop is to throw out the HDD it came with, throw in a sandforce or marvel controled SSD and do a fresh install (macs come with trial stuff too, just alot less compared to PC's)

OK, one more time:

Windows PCs historically have been unable to boot from an external drive. So any recovery software either has to be supplied on optical disk or on a hidden partition on the boot drive. This is a workaround to the technical limitations of Windows.)

what the hell are you talking about? my desktop with an Asus K8N that came out in mid 2004 could boot off any usb device including USB, thats how i installed windows 7 on it (AMD Sempron 3000+ 2GB ram, 160gb hdd for $300 at the time, runs 7 64bit AWESOME!, even does 1080p but only after an upgrade to an x850 video card)

Probably because the hard drive itself isn't capable of 6 Gbps.

'

sure but this bad ass piece of silicone can almost max 6gbit (6gbit is approx 768MB/s but with overhead and other crap its more like 650MB/s)
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380865,00.asp

550MB/s READ
525MB/s Write

100% awesome

what?! It's a well known fact amd crushes nvidia in opencl.

sure, does ati do good at anything else other than being a budget brand?

The days of keeping a computer for four or five years should be over. Gotta rock a new one every two years at a minimum. We need to be spending a LOT of money.

spending $2000 on a computer every year? so companies should spend several millions just for a refresh? no, it doesnt work that way, and before you say im too cheap or those people should stop being poor, im talking about several oil companies that i support that do not upgrade every 2 years. they have more money in their pockets than you could ever dream of.

 

[munkery]

WTH, sorry must be drunk?

 

[John.B]

You're simply wrong here.

Last fall I upgraded the HDD in my Lenovo T61p (almost 4 years old) from 100 GB to 500 GB. I pulled the 100 GB out, installed the 500 GB, put the 100 GB in a cheap SATA-USB 2.5 case (Buffalo MiniStation), booted the clone software from a USB thumbdrive, and copied all the data.

Rebooted.

WTF - I still only saw 100 GB! It took less than a minute of poking around in diskmgmt to realize that the ThinkPad had booted from the USB MiniStation instead of the internal SATA drive. To boot from the thumbdrive, I had set USB to have a higher boot priority. Although I'd pulled out the thumbdrive, the USB HDD had higher priority, and I booted from that.

You'll get a lot more traction bashing Windows if you at least use facts in your statements. Or maybe you consider summer 2007 to be "recent".

But "historically" you're right, Windows 3.1 couldn't boot from a USB hard drive. But then, Apple OS7 couldn't use target disk mode - so it's a wash historically.

2007 sounds about right. That was around the time when my son got the family PC spyware'd/virus'ed up for the second time in six months. No admin privs, whitelisted approved websites, just playing Flash-based games and surfing game sites with Internet Explorer on WinXP. A combination of a hacked website, cross site scripting vulnerabilities, Adobe Flash and, of course, the patently insecure combination of IE on XP…

Except that enough hardware had changed the second time around with a new DVD burner, that a reinstall triggered a WGA and I wasted an additional two hours on a Saturday trying to get an install key that would work from Microsoft. Beyond the whole reinstall fiasco.

Around that same time, I was playing in a band where most of the guys were running Logic and had a borrowed a MacBook to keep up with the band's new material outside of rehearsals.

So, yeah, that was the point I had enough and abandoned Windows on all of the home computers and jumped ship permanently to Macs and Linux. It was a pretty easy decision at the time and I certainly don't regret it now.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane, it was fun. LOL!

Here is some infomation for you. MS can not do anything about boot from USB. That was NEVER and I REPEAT never a MS issue. That was a hardware manufacture issue that needed to be addressed in either the the BIOS or EFI depending on which one that was being used.
MS has no control over the BIOS. The BIOS/EFI's job is to start the basic checks for the hardware and then look for boot file on a drive somewhere.
Normally goes in this order
A:, D: C: drive. Checks each one out. USB can be added to the list and owner just has to tell it want to do.
MS has no control beyond that.

FWIW, I checked all three Windows-capable PCs here (the two inactive ones are still running years worth of Windows updates as I type this): two Dells and an HP. None of them will boot from an external USB drive. Maybe it's a BIOS thing, maybe it's an XP thing. And I know for a fact that the HP box that is still running a Linux distro had to have the XP partition be first on the drive or GRUB would refuse to boot into XP. Maybe that's changed too?

So regardless if it was Microsoft or their OEMs who got their photocopiers out I say bravo, nothing like copying from the best.

 

[Kristenn]

Pr5Owner.

What trial software does a Macintosh come with preinstalled?

If you mean the iWork trial, Apple stopped including that a while ago!

 

[Rodimus Prime]

FWIW, I checked all three Windows-capable PCs here (the two inactive ones are still running years worth of Windows updates as I type this): two Dells and an HP. None of them will boot from an external USB drive. Maybe it's a BIOS thing, maybe it's an XP thing. And I know for a fact that the HP box that is still running a Linux distro had to have the XP partition be first on the drive or GRUB would refuse to boot into XP. Maybe that's changed too?

So regardless if it was Microsoft or their OEMs who got their photocopiers out I say bravo, nothing like copying from the best.

based on your post the computers you checked are pretty old so not a valid reason.
I know the computer I built in 2004 can boot from a USB. A BIOS update was release from the manufacture not long after I built it that allowed it to do that. Updating the BIOS as a breeze as ASUS also provided software to do it from with in windows.

As for Dell, HP and those OEM they are pretty well known to have very locked down and limited BIOS so not always a good example on top of that. DELL, HP bios for example do now allow for over clocking or turning on an off features in the BIOS. Again taking my desktop for example I can turn off USB booting. I just have to change some setting to allow the USB to work. Little more advance but easy to do.

MS has no real way to pressure OEM into booting from USB. Besides most users never care to boot from anything but the system drive. Booting from a disk is one of the more advanced features.

 

[twoodcc]

well i must admit, Lion didn't seem all that great at first. but it's looking like it's better than i first thought! looking forward to it!

 

[milo]

I'm laughing my ass off at all the hypocrites who defended apple dropping PPC but are now whining about losing Core duo/solo support.

Just as I said back then, it has nothing to do with philosophy, it just comes down to being fine with other people getting shafted but crying like a baby when it happens to you.

Very much looking forward to Lion, looks like a great update, especially the long overdue TRIM support.

 

[John.B]

I'm laughing my ass off at all the hypocrites who defended apple dropping PPC but are now whining about losing Core duo/solo support.

Just as I said back then, it has nothing to do with philosophy, it just comes down to being fine with other people getting shafted but crying like a baby when it happens to you.

Do you have specific examples or are you just making assumptions that these were the same people?

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

sure but this bad ass piece of silicone can almost max 6gbit (6gbit is approx 768MB/s but with overhead and other crap its more like 650MB/s)
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380865,00.asp

550MB/s READ
525MB/s Write

100% awesome

It sounds cool, but the sizes are less than useless to me. I'm not giving up my new 3TB drives to go back to the 500GB drives I had 5 years ago. I've got my new 3TB drive filled to over 2.2TB already converting a movie library and I've only had it two months. 500GB is a good portable drive size, but mass media is where the speed comes in handy given I'm moving 4-13GB size files around all the time and 500GB just doesn't cut it. Given you can get well over 100MB/sec transfers with standard 7200RPM hard drives, it doesn't make much sense to me to pay $500 for a 500GB drive when you can get a 3TB drive for well under $200. I could have over 6TB for the price of one 500GB drive. I'm sure it's handy for non-media, but then unless you're moving large files, the speed difference isn't going to be quite as spectacular/noticeable since smaller files always move slower than large continuous ones.

 

[munkery]

Anybody notice if Clamav is included by default in Mac OS X Lion?

It is included by default in Mac OS X Server, so I thought it may be included in Lion given that it is a hybrid client/server release.