[CentOS] hfsplus.ko

Tue Sep 6 22:04:50 UTC 2011
Ned Slider <ned at unixmail.co.uk>

On 06/09/11 16:34, Lamar Owen wrote:
> On Friday, September 02, 2011 12:48:47 AM Ned Slider wrote:
>> You should also consider filing a bug report upstream and make a case
>> for hfsplus inclusion in the RHEL6 kernel. It's not unheard of for Red
>> Hat to turn modules back on that they had previously disabled.
>
> There be dragons here.
>
> Be very, very , careful with hfsplus on Linux.  I have had more than one HFS+ non-journalled volume toasted by the Linux in-kernel driver.
>
> There is a supported commerical solution for HFS+ for Linux made by Paragon.  I've not put it under load yet (load being deleting a few hundred thousand files in a tree; that sort of operation on Fedora 12 (very similar kernel to RHEL6) was a 100% reproduceable, nonrecoverable, filesystem 'toast') but plan to soon enough.
>
> While I haven't found the documentation for it due to the way kernel patches are now done, I suspect the data reliability problem is the reason upstream has disabled it.  It works fine for read-only purposes, but I wouldn't use it for bidirectional data interchange.  Or do all of your deletion of large trees of small files (like trees of source code) inside Mac OS.
>
> Better for interchange is one of the two or three ext2/3/4 filesystem drivers for MacOS (I'm using the one from Paragon, and it works well, even with large ext4 volumes) or using NTFS and drivers for Mac OS for NTFS (again, I use the Paragon drivers which came with my Seagate 1TB external).
>
> HFS+ is just barely supported under the in-kernel Linux driver last I looked, and may go away from kernel mainline at some point.
>
> So, this is one case to be really careful.


Thanks for the heads up.