[CentOS] hfsplus.ko

Tue Sep 6 15:34:50 UTC 2011
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

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.