On Tue 13-05-25 12:13:23, Nick Chan 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 can see that accessing APFS filesystem is useful at times. But the question is: why do we need it in the kernel? Why isn't a FUSE driver enough? Because for relatively niche usecase like this that is a much more acceptable (and easier to maintain) choice. Honza -- Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxxx> SUSE Labs, CR
