In early 2025 it was being discussed to [1]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 [2]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 [3]this Git merge .



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

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

[3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=0de672c7e1920acc5675d0dd22718c4f6e6b4447