Re: Subject: [RFC PATCH v2 0/8] staging: apfs: init APFS filesystem support

Nick Chan
2025-05-13T04:13:29Z

Ernesto A. Fernández 於 2025/5/13 清晨7:40 寫道:
> Hi Yangtao,
>
> On Mon, May 12, 2025 at 04:11:22AM -0600, Yangtao Li wrote:
>> I'm interested in bringing apfs upstream to the community, and perhaps
>> slava and adrian too.
> Do you have any particular use case in mind here? I don't mind putting in
> the work to get the driver upstream, but I don't want to be fighting people
> to convince them that it's needed. I'm not even sure about it myself.

These are the use cases I can think of:

1. When running Linux on Apple Silicon Mac, accessing the xART APFS volume is required for enabling some SEP
functionalities.

2. When running Linux on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple TV (currently there are Apple A7-A11 SoC support in
upstream), resizing the main APFS volume is not feasible especially on A11 due to shenanigans with the encrypted
data volume. So the safe ish way to store a file system on the disk becomes a using linux-apfs-rw on a (possibly
fixed size) volume that only has one file and that file is used as a loopback device.

(do note that the main storage do not currently work upstream and I only have storage working on A11 downstream)

3. Obviously, accessing Mac files from Linux too, not sure how big of a use case that is but apparently it is
big enough for hfsplus to continue receive patches here and there.
>
> Ernesto
>
Nick Chan