There’s the possibility raised that the mainline Linux kernel might remove its file-system kernel drivers for Apple HFS and HFS+ this year.
Apple no longer supports the Hierarchical File System on the latest versions of macOS itself and in prior releases was read-only support since macOS 10.6 for HFS itself. The newer HFS+ file-system does continue to be supported by Apple. Linux support for HFS has been poor and ill-maintained and it looks like the kernel drivers could be on their way out.
Prominent Linux kernel developer Christian Brauner of Microsoft has raised the possibility of removing the HFS/HFS+ kernel drivers this year. Brauner posted today:
“Let’s try and remove #hfs and #hfsplus by the end of 2025. They have been orphaned since 2014 and are turning into a maintenance burden.”
It makes sense with them being orphaned for more than a decade and Apple not even supporting the original HFS on macOS 10.15+. For those wanting to access HFS file-systems from Linux, there does exist HFS FUSE driver support for leveraging file-systems in user-space.
The issue was raised that some Linux distributions do rely on the HFS+ driver for installing on Intel-based Macs where HFS+ can be used as the EFI System Partition (ESP). We’ll see what solution comes about there or if it’s decided to only remove the original HFS (not HFS+) kernel driver support. In any event we’ll see what comes about and if anyone bothers to step up to maintain the HFS Linux driver code.
