Apple HFS / HFS+ File-System Support Continues Seeing Fixes With Linux 7.3

In early 2025 it was being discussed to potentially drop the HFS and HFS+ file-system support with the code having been orphaned over a decade and becoming a maintenance burden. But that dismal outlook quickly turned around with some developers stepping up to maintain the old Apple file-system support. Over a year later, fortunately, it's turned out to be a success story with more HFS/HFS+ file-system fixes continuing to work their way into the mainline Linux kernel.

In the Linux kernel updates over the past year there have been a steady flow of HFS/HFS+ file-system fixes. With the ongoing Linux 7.3 merge window there is once again activity around these file-systems that Apple itself hasn't even been supporting in the macOS world for years: Apple ended the original HFS in macOS 10.6 in 2009 and in 2017 replaced HFS+ with the modern APFS file-system.

For Linux 7.3 there are a number of fixes to issues uncovered by Syzbot as well as xfstest testing failures. There is a b-tree bitmap corruption check, validation improvements, some logic refactoring, and also a clean-up for the KUnit testing.

Those still finding a use for HFS/HFS+ file-system support on modern Linux distributions can find the full list of fixes via this Git merge.