Just a few days ago there was talk of potentially removing the Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers from the Linux kernel considering they had been orphaned for a decade and beginning to cause a maintenance burden. After briefly being marked for deprecation, it now looks like the drivers may be maintained with new maintainers alleging to step-up to the role.
Apple HFS/HFS+ Linux file-system drivers haven’t been well maintained in over a decade and even Apple phased out the original Hierarchical File System on recent macOS releases. But as some older Apple systems still rely on HFS+ for their EFI System Partitition (ESP), it looks like there might still be some life left to the file-system use under Linux.
Longtime Linux developer Christian Brauner of Microsoft was working on deprecating the HFS and HFS+ code within the Linux kernel when some community developers have stepped up to maintain them.
In response to the patch deprecating the drivers, an IBM developer who previously contributed to the HFS+ driver more then a decade ago offered to help in trying to re-engage over the HFS/HFS+ driver code. Viacheslav Dubeyko would prefer seeing the HFS+ code at least continuing to stick around the kernel.
Debian developer John Paul Adrian Glaubitz in turn also expressed his willingness to help co-maintain the HFS/HFS+ code in testing/reviewing patches. Glaubitz still oversees some Apple PowerMacs and has found value in the old file-system code:
“If you’re willing to step up as a maintainer, I would be happy to assist you by testing and reviewing patches. I have PowerMacs available for testing and it’s also possible to just install Debian’s 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC on an emulated PowerMac on QEMU using the “mac99” machine types to test booting from an HFS/HFS+ partition.
I am Debian’s primary maintainer of these PowerPC ports in Debian (not to be confused with the little-endian PowerPC port) and I can also easily build various test images if needed.”
In turn sent out today was this week’s VFS fixes pull request ahead of the Linux 6.15-rc3 release on Sunday. That patch ends up adding the HFS/HFS+ deprecation warnings only to remove it in the same pull request. Brauner explained:
“Revert the hfs{plus} deprecation warning that’s also included in this pull request. The commit introducing the deprecation warning resides rather early in this branch. So simply dropping it would’ve rebased all other commits which I decided to avoid. Hence the revert in the same branch.”
So at least for now it looks like the Apple HFS/HFS+ file-system support for Linux will be sticking along if this code indeed begins seeing maintenance.
