Probe Utility Needed?

[johnothwolo]

Currently there's no convenient way to probe the volume roles. I think this also makes it harder for the average user who can't exactly examine the filesystem or kernel code.

I honestly think this would require #11 to be completed first. CopyPasta-ing another utility to create a simple probing tool (or any other tool for that matter) would be too cumbersome.

[eafer]

What do you mean by probing the volume roles? Do you need a way to know the role of each volume before mount?

[johnothwolo]

An average user may not know if volume n is the System volume, Data volume and so on. However, my initial proposal was a bit short sighted. I think it would be better to list the containers like how LVM lists volume groups. I was working on a freebsd driver that did that. I believe that change would also involve modifications in the kernel module. Following the LVM method would avoid Apple's "disk1s1s1" mess, which somebody in some forum (FreeBSD?) mocked iirc.

E.g. for a regular macOS drive:

|-- dev
     |-- sda
     |-- sda0 (Fat32 EFI) 
     |-- sda1 (Apfs Container)
     |-- apfs
           |-- sda1
                 |-- Volume1
                 |-- Volume2
                 |-- ...

And maybe add a "by-name" node:

|-- dev
     |-- apfs
           |-- sda1
                |-- by-name
                       |-- Preboot@1
                       |-- Recovery@2
                       |-- Macintosh HD@3
                       |-- My Files@4

I don't remember if system volumes have volume names (a lot has happened in the past year), but if not, the Volume role could be used instead (Preboot and Recovery in the example).

[eafer]

There is an apfs-label tool now that lists the labels of all volumes in a container. It wouldn't be too hard to add roles to that as well, if you think you need that.