It was just earlier this year that Linux developers considered dropping the Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers from the mainline Linux kernel for being unmaintained. But then some new developers stepped up to maintain the drivers and there has been new HFS/HFS+ file-system patches each kernel cycle since. With the now in-development Linux 6.19 kernel there are some nice year-end clean-ups to these file-system drivers.

Viacheslav Dubeyko sent out the HFS/HFS+ patches for Linux 6.19 today on this first full day of the new merge window. There are fixes for issues uncovered by Syzbot, moving some common code to headers shared between the two drivers, a few volume corruption fixes, adding KUnit test coverage for some HFS operations, and other mostly mundane fixes and code clean-ups.

Those still relying on the Apple HFS or HFS+ file-system support under Linux can see this pull request for the changes on the way to Linux 6.19.