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

Ernesto A. Fernández
2025-05-14T20:19:35Z

Hi Nick,

On Tue, May 13, 2025 at 12:13:23PM +0800, Nick Chan wrote:
> 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.

That's very interesting. Fragmentation will be brutal after a while though.
Unless you are patching away the copy-on-write somehow?

> 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.

True, but the hfsplus driver is already merged and people may be relying on
it. Still, there was some push to get rid of it recently. I don't expect
much support for picking up a whole new driver.

Ernesto