MacOS Catalina has a dedicated system volume now

[pippox0]

Apple have used one partition for years in the past and user data were safe and untouched in case of re-installation or upgrade of mac system.

It was easy and simple and no one can complain about it.

Apple has lost his focus to " keep it simple and just works"...

Apple now wants a more closed system (don't put your hands on...) and make more money.
Bye bye third part app and utility ( i. e. Carbon Copy Cloner..)

This is IMO

 

[spheris]

Apple have used one partition for years in the past and user data were safe and untouched in case of re-installation or upgrade of mac system.

It was easy and simple and no one can complain about it.

Apple has lost his focus to " keep it simple and just works"...

Apple now wants a more closed system (don't put your hands on...) and make more money.
Bye bye third part app and utility ( i. e. Carbon Copy Cloner..)

This is IMO

MacOS has always been a closed standards based system. That is not a new thing. It's why the PowerMacs didn't work out. It's not just in their DNA as a company. It has it's pro and con - mostly pro because it's kept them ahead of the curve in their market for more than 35 years now and I think it's underestimated as a path. If you look at it, it's why linux never caught on as a mainstream system and Windows struggles with it's own relevance and has had to resort to the moves they've had to in recent years because it's become recognized predominately as a gaming platform and it's made itself mostly irrelevant as an office platform by moving it's own office suites away from it's own platforms to html/jx in order to keep a market segment.

I would give this some time and at the end see if it isn't simple and just works. It's become a mess right now and this is obviously a move back to making it the opposite and making it a hard rule rather than an exception. Walled garden or not. Get Xcode and roll your own if that's a problem. Don't depend on any company to just placate you.

As far as money grab. I point to the Mac Pro due this fall. Right now a lot of people are making noises about the expense and ignoring that it might be the most advanced and comprehensive professional oriented system to be built at this point in time. The components are not even the beginning of the story with that machine and it's the backbone topology of the seawall that is going to be what people are talking about when it ships. Not the CPU or GPUs or even the ridiculous cost of a 999 stand for a monitor whose nearest equivalent is in the 43000 range.

I'll put it this way. Even high end workstations are built to a cost performance target and with a mentality of iteration. This machine isn't. It uses 3x the traces in even the closest high end motherboards for power and pci channel connection and those connections are processor centric. The design is closer to the MIPS/SGI model than anything apple has ever done and I'm positive they had intel and supermicro pulling their hair out over the design and validation stages for the sheer fact few current system boards and even workstation class exceed 24/36 channels and provide no powered lanes in the sense of this one. Add on the it provides a 64 lane topology and powered lanes. I expect the base system to deliver punch for punch 1.5-2.2x performance ratios over the previous gen xeon systems (iMac Pro) depending on workflow for the sheer lack of bottle necks or limited lanes to feed it. It might be the lowest compromised, most balanced motherboard design since never, or at least since the indigo 2 systems.

Is it expensive to do that? you bet. Is it a money grab? Time will tell, if it makes post house A and Audio Post House B happy and extends profitability - then probably no. Definitely something is up at Apple, kind of feels like the marketing and hedge fund guys have been pushed to the fringes and the engineers are back in the seat for a while to steer the ship back into it's lane. I hope so. It's been a rough time for their core market on the MacOS side. This is a big departure on the road back to what made a Mac a Mac and the funny thing is I don't mind the IOS tagalongs. At least the catalyst stuff is useful to someone 😉

 

[xgman]

I can't imagine that you would not be able to easily remove 3rd party items in the launch agents and daemons folders. That would be really bad.

 

[redheeler]

MacOS has always been a closed standards based system. That is not a new thing. It's why the PowerMacs didn't work out. It's not just in their DNA as a company. It has it's pro and con - mostly pro because it's kept them ahead of the curve in their market for more than 35 years now and I think it's underestimated as a path. If you look at it, it's why linux never caught on as a mainstream system and Windows struggles with it's own relevance and has had to resort to the moves they've had to in recent years because it's become recognized predominately as a gaming platform and it's made itself mostly irrelevant as an office platform by moving it's own office suites away from it's own platforms to html/jx in order to keep a market segment.

I would give this some time and at the end see if it isn't simple and just works. It's become a mess right now and this is obviously a move back to making it the opposite and making it a hard rule rather than an exception. Walled garden or not. Get Xcode and roll your own if that's a problem. Don't depend on any company to just placate you.

As far as money grab. I point to the Mac Pro due this fall. Right now a lot of people are making noises about the expense and ignoring that it might be the most advanced and comprehensive professional oriented system to be built at this point in time. The components are not even the beginning of the story with that machine and it's the backbone topology of the seawall that is going to be what people are talking about when it ships. Not the CPU or GPUs or even the ridiculous cost of a 999 stand for a monitor whose nearest equivalent is in the 43000 range.

I'll put it this way. Even high end workstations are built to a cost performance target and with a mentality of iteration. This machine isn't. It uses 3x the traces in even the closest high end motherboards for power and pci channel connection and those connections are processor centric. The design is closer to the MIPS/SGI model than anything apple has ever done and I'm positive they had intel and supermicro pulling their hair out over the design and validation stages for the sheer fact few current system boards and even workstation class exceed 24/36 channels and provide no powered lanes in the sense of this one. Add on the it provides a 64 lane topology and powered lanes. I expect the base system to deliver punch for punch 1.5-2.2x performance ratios over the previous gen xeon systems (iMac Pro) depending on workflow for the sheer lack of bottle necks or limited lanes to feed it. It might be the lowest compromised, most balanced motherboard design since never, or at least since the indigo 2 systems.

Is it expensive to do that? you bet. Is it a money grab? Time will tell, if it makes post house A and Audio Post House B happy and extends profitability - then probably no. Definitely something is up at Apple, kind of feels like the marketing and hedge fund guys have been pushed to the fringes and the engineers are back in the seat for a while to steer the ship back into it's lane. I hope so. It's been a rough time for their core market on the MacOS side. This is a big departure on the road back to what made a Mac a Mac and the funny thing is I don't mind the IOS tagalongs. At least the catalyst stuff is useful to someone 😉

High-end professionals can certainly find ways to justify the $6K+ cost, but Apple has essentially told most home professionals and power users that they won't be getting the affordable, expandable, upgradable Mac Pro they remember from the cMP days. The only options for this group of buyers continue to be the Mac mini or iMac, and both of these products still have plenty of compromises the old cMPs did not.

 

[spheris]

I agree, price of entry is high if you are not profiting from the investment and most prosumer/home professional situation are margined out because of the ROI question. I think this machine is a dividing line between the prosumer and professional market segments. Honestly the topped out iMac or iMac pro serve the prosumer markets and at the top end provide more than they probably need or will use for their purposes. Nothing about the Mac Pro speaks to those needs and it's not meant to be affordable - it an answer to performance and capacity and endurance at any cost and to be realistic, it's not a high cost for what it brings to the table for the shops prospecting it. I watched the LTT breakdown like everyone else and cringed that Linus even went as far as he did with virtually no investment in investigating what the machine actually is to try to do a cost analysis - if he had, he would have realized and pointed out that the seawall itself is likely between 1500 and 1800 of the cost in the limited volume it will be produced not to mention the r&d and custom tooling for it to manufacture. What could have been a really useful editorial on the presentation turned into clickbait and not a good moment on his part. It will be at least two years before another company can follow suit if they even want to into that market territory by virtue they will have to put their own design, r&d and investment in custom tooling and validation to come to a similar result. I don't see that in the offing in the pc market but maybe it could turn around.

That segment is where the Mac Pro will live. I think for the home professional the iMac Pro will probably be best fit. It comes down to the ROI question.

 

[redheeler]

The iMac Pro is a great product, but it's still lacking the versatility and low entry price of the old cMP. Imagine a cMP-like tower with a single 8-core Xeon W, Radeon Pro 580 graphics in a standard PCIe 3.0 x16 slot and three more PCIe slots available, all for the same $2,999 price as the previous-generation Mac Pro. Then, an external Apple 5K display for $1,499, bringing the total to $4,499; or a third-party display if that is desired instead. Now you've got a workstation with expandability, plenty of thermal headroom, upgradable display, upgradable graphics, and upgradable CPU that could easily perform well and stay cutting-edge for 7-9 years with the proper aftermarket upgrades. All this for $500 less than the base model iMac Pro, the only downsides being no Vega GPU or 1 TB SSD, but both of these are easy to fix thanks to the tower's internal expansion capabilities.

This kind of workstation setup was exactly what a home professional or power user was offered back in the cMP days, and this is why many of these users are still able to use their upgraded cMP 9 years later (with aftermarket display, graphics, I/O, etc.). But instead Apple wants to sell you a glued-in screen, soldered-in GPU, and difficult to access CPU / RAM.

 

[spheris]

It's been almost 14 years since the cMP, This isn't same same machine, nor is it made with the same tech or cost considerations for parts etc and has roughly 4x the same expansion options. I don't know if anything short of maybe a classic reissue would ever get something back to that price range. I do think there will be a lower range model at some point if they discontinue the iMP. Maybe half the slots, fewer power subs but that won't be until we see if a refresh happens and if they hit their numbers on the Mac Pro itself.

 

[7rw]

Hi, I just want to ask is it possible to delete system kexts in catalina? I have read about the possibility to disable SIP and remount as read write to modify the system volume, but when I reboot, will it revert the changes I made to the system volume, OR will it just revert the state to read only, but the changes that I made before (in read write mode) is still preserved? Thanks.

 

[spheris]

Hi, I just want to ask is it possible to delete system kexts in catalina? I have read about the possibility to disable SIP and remount as read write to modify the system volume, but when I reboot, will it revert the changes I made to the system volume, OR will it just revert the state to read only, but the changes that I made before (in read write mode) is still preserved? Thanks.

Doable in DP2, unless there's a last minute course change, won't be possible probably after public beta 2/3. Kexts will have to be hardened, approved and notarized in any case so it may not matter and doesn't need to be done anyway. That's already a hard rule from 10.14.5 and thank them for getting serious about that. I know it makes the Hack community sour but it's not linux or windows. Id start bugging your ISV for support updates now. It's on them to provide unless you're willing to go through the process yourself to write validate and submit them to apple for approval.

 

[D3ggy]

Haven't seen the video, but the following command seemed to work:

sudo mount -t apfs -wu /dev/disk1s5 /Volumes

For anyone else wanting to try this, replace disk1s5 with the identifier for your system partition (you can find this in Disk Utility by clicking Info with the partition selected, then looking next to BSD device node), and follow up with killall Finder to restart the Finder.
[doublepost=1560876925][/doublepost]Thanks, going to quote this here. Definitely a bit cleaner than my command, but either one works. 🙂

[doublepost=1560877401][/doublepost]One-line solution that works once logged in (with SIP disabled):

sudo mount -wu /; killall Finder

Worked like a dream, thank you. Still can’t get the drive icon to change though

 

[7rw]

Can you tell me which icon pack is this? It is very nice.

 

[D3ggy]

Can you tell me which icon pack is this? It is very nice.

One I made, at least most of them.

 

[TheRealDrJones]

Until now it was possible to create several APFS-Volumes and install a bootable System on each one independently.

Would that still be possible with the system volume singled out? Wouldn't there be a conflict I would install say 10.15 Catalina next to a future Version 10.16, because both would need to live on the same data volume?

 

[spheris]

Until now it was possible to create several APFS-Volumes and install a bootable System on each one independently.

Would that still be possible with the system volume singled out? Wouldn't there be a conflict I would install say 10.15 Catalina next to a future Version 10.16, because both would need to live on the same data volume?

No indication of problems as yet. Using multiple installs across both raid (ssd and spinning disk) and nvme tB3 enclosures and 2 internal PCI nvme cards. Same caveat as always, disable spotlight for the non active system drives in whatever install you are currently installed to, otherwise no change from previous versions.

 

[TheRealDrJones]

No indication of problems as yet. Using multiple installs across both raid (ssd and spinning disk) and nvme tB3 enclosures and 2 internal PCI nvme cards. Same caveat as always, disable spotlight for the non active system drives in whatever install you are currently installed to, otherwise no change from previous versions.

Thank you for sharing your experience.

I tested it myself yesterday and installed the beta on another volume next to two Mojave volumes. So far everything works. But the real test would be two have two (four actually) Catalina volumes on the same drive. Have you tested that as well?

I could not find any indication of the two Catalina volumes forming a volume group in disk utility, so I wonder how they establish the link between the two. Is it just a naming convention?

 

[Project Alice]

A few of my desktop from my main Mojave installation. As if I didn't already have enough disks on my desktop, Catalina just had to add two more.
I'm not sure how I'll like the separated volumes yet.

Thank you for sharing your experience.

I tested it myself yesterday and installed the beta on another volume next to two Mojave volumes. So far everything works. But the real test would be two have two (four actually) Catalina volumes on the same drive. Have you tested that as well?

I could not find any indication of the two Catalina volumes forming a volume group in disk utility, so I wonder how they establish the link between the two. Is it just a naming convention?

It looks like just a second partition under the same volume. This screenshot is also under Mojave, the two Catalina partitions are the furthest down in the list.

 

[TheRealDrJones]

A few of my desktop from my main Mojave installation. As if I didn't already have enough disks on my desktop, Catalina just had to add two more.
I'm not sure how I'll like the separated volumes yet.
View attachment 845098


It looks like just a second partition under the same volume. This screenshot is also under Mojave, the two Catalina partitions are the furthest down in the list.
View attachment 845100

OK, but then we are talking about different scenarios.
What I had in mind was multiple APFS volumes on the same partition/container, which is great because you don't have to resize anything, can create dual boot setups in no time and throw them away just as easily. It's perfect to mess around with experimental installations when you're afraid to mess up your main OS.

But so far I don't see anything to prevent that in the future. My guess is that the system and data volumes are linked by a naming convention, so there shouldn't be any conflicts.

 

[macdos]

Is /private part of the system or data partition? Access to /etc (which is /private/etc) is somewhat crucial…

 

[Project Alice]

OK, but then we are talking about different scenarios.
What I had in mind was multiple APFS volumes on the same partition/container, which is great because you don't have to resize anything, can create dual boot setups in no time and throw them away just as easily. It's perfect to mess around with experimental installations when you're afraid to mess up your main OS.

But so far I don't see anything to prevent that in the future. My guess is that the system and data volumes are linked by a naming convention, so there shouldn't be any conflicts.

I see what you're getting at. I actually tried doing that when I made the second partition for Catalina in the first place. It wasn't working.

 

[adrianlondon]

Is /private part of the system or data partition? Access to /etc (which is /private/etc) is somewhat crucial…

/private is on the Data volume

They're using hardlinks back from /System/Volumes/Data, and "private" is hardlinked to /private. In some cases (such as usr) they're hardlinking only certain subdirectories, but for private the entire thing is linked back.

 

[spheris]

Thank you for sharing your experience.

I tested it myself yesterday and installed the beta on another volume next to two Mojave volumes. So far everything works. But the real test would be two have two (four actually) Catalina volumes on the same drive. Have you tested that as well?

I could not find any indication of the two Catalina volumes forming a volume group in disk utility, so I wonder how they establish the link between the two. Is it just a naming convention?

It's all done by firm linking, it's a new functionality for apfs and it's related to the older hard symlink of hfs+ with some added capabilities and security medium types. Very cool stuff and with a t2 chip almost as hardened as an iPhone (waits for lightning strike) never thought I would advocate for that but it does solve a plethora of security issues and stability issues for this iteration of MacOS

 

[Juancheen]

Haven't seen the video, but the following command seemed to work:

sudo mount -t apfs -wu /dev/disk1s5 /Volumes

For anyone else wanting to try this, replace disk1s5 with the identifier for your system partition (you can find this in Disk Utility by clicking Info with the partition selected, then looking next to BSD device node), and follow up with killall Finder to restart the Finder.
[doublepost=1560876925][/doublepost]Thanks, going to quote this here. Definitely a bit cleaner than my command, but either one works. 🙂

[doublepost=1560877401][/doublepost]One-line solution that works once logged in (with SIP disabled):

sudo mount -wu /; killall Finder

If you ever plan to create a religion, count me in. YOU'RE GOD!!!
I've been looking for this solution for days and days everywhere. Thank you a million times!!!!

 

[younker]

How about I edit /etc/hosts.

 

[jbarley]

Separate volumes make backup, cloning, HDD/SSD upgrades and recovery more simple. So I agree with you.

Sorry for coming late to the game, but I do have a question.
In the past I used CCC to clone my whole system, now do I need to make a separate clone for each of the 2 partitions,
like a clone for "Catalina" and another for "Catalina Data" to have a total safe backup?
Curious minds just gotta know.🙂

 

[poorcody]

Sorry for coming late to the game, but I do have a question.
In the past I used CCC to clone my whole system, now do I need to make a separate clone for each of the 2 partitions,
like a clone for "Catalina" and another for "Catalina Data" to have a total safe backup?
Curious minds just gotta know.🙂

Sounds like they are going to make it as "seamless" as possible -- so it may take care of everything for you. See their blog post:

https://bombich.com/blog/2019/06/06...em-volume-and-hfs-getting-out-system-business