macOS Tahoe's ASIF Disk Images: A Performance Leap

macOS Tahoe introduces ASIF, a new disk image format that dramatically improves virtual machine performance. ASIF images are independent of the host filesystem's capabilities, achieving near-native speeds; for example, on an M3 Pro MacBook Pro, unencrypted APFS volumes reached 5.8 GB/s read and 6.6 GB/s write. ASIF offers a massive speed advantage over previous UDSP images and saves disk space. Currently, ASIF images can only be created in Tahoe, but they work in Sequoia. Future virtualization software is expected to support ASIF, further enhancing VM performance.