Hi, On Fri, Feb 28, 2025, at 02:53, Ethan Carter Edwards wrote: > Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the lack of APFS support on > Linux. I was wondering what I could do about that. APFS support is not > in-tree, but there is a proprietary module sold by Paragon software [0]. > Obviously, this could not be used in-tree. However, there is also an > open source driver that, from what I can tell, was once planned to be > upstreamed [1] with associated filesystem progs [2]. I think I would > base most of my work off of the existing FOSS tree. > > The biggest barrier I see currently is the driver's use of bufferheads. > I realize that there has been a lot of work to move existing filesystem > implementations to iomap/folios, and adding a filesystem that uses > bufferheads would be antithetical to the purpose of that effort. > Additionally, there is a lot of ifndefs/C preprocessor magic littered > throughout the codebase that fixes functionality with various different > versions of Linux. > > The first step would be to move away from bufferheads and the > versioning. I plan to start my work in the next few weeks, and hope to > have a working driver to submit to staging by the end of June. From > there, I will work to have it meet more kernel standards and hopefully > move into fs/ by the end of the year. > > Before I started, I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts. I am open > to feedback. If you think this is a bad idea, let me know. I am very > passionate about the Asahi Linux project. I think this would be a good > way to indirectly give back and contribute to the project. While I > recognize that it is not one of Asahi's project goals (those being > mostly hardware support), I am confident many users would find it > helpful. I sure would. Agreed, I think it would be helpful for many people (especially those who still regularly dual boot between macOS and Linux) to have a working APFS driver upstream. This may also be useful once we fully bring up the Secure Enclave and need to read/write to at least a single file on the xART partition which has to be APFS because it's shared between all operating systems running on a single machine. It looks like there's still recent activity on that linux-apfs github repository. Have you reached out to the people working on it to see what their plans for upstreaming and/or future work are? Best, Sven
