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

Aditya Garg
2025-05-13T11:41:36Z

> On 13 May 2025, at 9:43 AM, Nick Chan <towinchenmi@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ﻿
>> 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.
>>

I'll add a number 4

4. Mounting the macOS recovery partition makes getting the wifi firmware much easier for T2 Macs on Linux.