Apple Fusion Drive?

[tian]

We are still trying some things with Fog and Apple/iMacs. Now there is the case that our iMacs had Fusion Drive configured by default (1TB HDD + 120GB SSD).

When the capture task (“Apple Mac OS”, Multiple Partitions - all disks) starts, the first partition of the first hard drive (sda1) is correctly recognized as FAT32 and processes - after that sda2 is only recognized as RAW and it wants to read all 1TB of this partition. That was the point when we stopped the capture task.

Then we deleted the logical Fusion Drive volume and installed OSX on the 120GB SSD and some programs on the 1TB drive. The capturing task for this got both hard drives correctly (sda2 and sdb2 both have been recognized as “HFS Plus”) and also deploying was working fine. (Version 8405)

Will it ever be possible to capture (except RAW mode) a Fusion Drive based Apple computer or is this basically impossible with fog/partclone?

Thanks for clarifying this.

• Here are the outputs of how the Fusion Drive is structured and what fdisk can see.

+-- Logical Volume Group 0B0C9110-00C1-4FFC-8B4C-43838EBA8467
    =========================================================
    Name:         Macintosh HD
    Status:       Online
    Size:         1120333979648 B (1.1 TB)
    Free Space:   114688 B (114.7 KB)
    |
    +-< Physical Volume 3FC1F21A-BCCB-44E0-AA38-2DB01A098269
    |   ----------------------------------------------------
    |   Index:    0
    |   Disk:     disk0s2
    |   Status:   Online
    |   Size:     120988852224 B (121.0 GB)
    |
    +-< Physical Volume 7311A6E0-7270-4296-B876-2BA6DD3FD633
    |   ----------------------------------------------------
    |   Index:    1
    |   Disk:     disk1s2
    |   Status:   Online
    |   Size:     999345127424 B (999.3 GB)
    |
    +-> Logical Volume Family 933DD69E-C958-496B-82F5-9C37FB3C7BA9
        ----------------------------------------------------------
        Encryption Type:         None
        |
        +-> Logical Volume FE81AFDB-4DE9-4A4C-B68A-3A1161F2453D
            ---------------------------------------------------
            Disk:                  disk3
            Status:                Online
            Size (Total):          1111826497536 B (1.1 TB)
            Revertible:            No
            LV Name:               System
            Volume Name:           System
            Content Hint:          Apple_HFS
            LVG Type:              Fusion, Sparse

Disk /dev/sda: 931.5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: BE052CDF-27AC-46B6-A41F-938739331BE5

Device          Start        End    Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sda1          40     409639     409600   200M EFI System
/dev/sda2      409640 1952255591 1951845952 930.7G Apple Core storage
/dev/sda3  1952255592 1953525127    1269536 619.9M Apple boot

Disk /dev/sdb: 113 GiB, 121332826112 bytes, 236978176 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: D8DBD088-623B-4733-B8F6-D6EAB8FFBED3

Device         Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sdb1         40    409639    409600   200M EFI System
/dev/sdb2     409640 236715991 236306352 112.7G Apple Core storage
/dev/sdb3  236715992 236978135    262144   128M Apple boot

[Sebastian Roth]

@tian From what I found out e.g. on wikipedia I don’t think we will be able to natively support/capture Apple’s Fusion Drive any time soon:

Fusion Drive is a block-level solution based on Apple’s Core Storage, a logical volume manager managing multiple physical devices.

Same as with the linux based logical volume manager the Apple LVM information is written somewhere on the disks I suppose (if RAW is working then that’s the case!). So we would need to check for Apple LVM volume information and configure the logical volumes before we can read the actual data from the HFS+ filesystem.

So far we don’t even support LVM with linux as far as I know. There have been requests but we just don’t find the time to implement this feature. If anyone is interested please shout out loud. We are more than happy to give support to anyone who is keen to try to add this to FOG.

A quick search revealed this interesting post. Possibly we would be able to use the mentioned libfvde (or just parts of it) to use Fusion Drive and normal Core Storage LVM volumes…

[tian]

@Sebastian-Roth Thanks for the explanation.