Nearly one year ago to the day I noted [1]Linux developers were considering the removal of the Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers from the kernel. They were orphaned the past decade and turning into a maintenance burden for upstream developers. But then to some surprise, [2]a few developers stepped up to maintain the HFS(+) drivers . One year later it's proving to be a success story with more fixes for this aging Apple file-system support continuing.

After developers last year stepped up to maintain the HFS/HFS+ drivers so they could remain in the mainline kernel, we've been seeing [3]an assortment of fixes almost each kernel cycle. With Linux 7.1 and now one year later, there is a hearty batch of fixes on the way to the mainline tree.

The HFS/HFS+ file-system driver code saw several fixes for issues raised by Syzbot. Plus some xfstests failures were also addressed. The fixes from four developers included:

"- hfsplus: fix generic/642 failure

- hfsplus: rework logic of map nodes creation in xattr b-tree

- hfsplus: fix logic of alloc/free b-tree node

- hfsplus: fix error processing issue in hfs_bmap_free()

- hfsplus: fix potential race conditions in b-tree functionality

- hfsplus: extract hidden directory search into a helper function

- hfsplus: fix held lock freed on hfsplus_fill_super()

- hfsplus: fix generic/523 test-case failure

- hfsplus: validate b-tree node 0 bitmap at mount time

- hfsplus: refactor b-tree map page access and add node-type validation

- hfsplus: fix to update ctime after rename

- hfsplus: fix generic/533 test-case failure

- hfsplus: set ctime after setxattr and removexattr

- hfsplus: fix uninit-value by validating catalog record size

- hfsplus: fix potential Allocation File corruption after fsync"

All the details can be found via the [4]HFS pull request for Linux 7.1. So with this maintenance work continuing, the Apple HFS/HFS+ file-system support is going strong in the mainline kernel even with macOS just focused on the Apple File System (APFS) these days.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-2025-Sad-State-HFS

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Apple-HFS-2025-Linux-Maintain

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.19-HFS-HFS-Plus

[4] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/8a4699567ef82973224fe25d372c0831a46b189e.camel@dubeyko.com/T/#u