Does anyone still need to create legacy HFS filesystems?

[Chris Murphy]

On Feb 3, 2012, at 12:47 PM, Jim Meyering wrote:

> Right.  The code explicitly rejects any attempt to resize a partition
> on a disk with sector size != 512.  Due to this confusion with
> jhdr_size, at least for now, I do not plan to change that bit.
> 
> Maybe someone who is motivated and capable will submit a patch,
> once the resizing code is back on parted's master branch.

The most relevant document, TN1150, which I cited, is considered a legacy document and was last updated in 2004. I haven't been able to find newer documentation. It would seem something has changed with respect to jhdr_size, and has not been documented. (I'm not even slightly surprised.)

A separate subject is the lack of read or write support for hfsx. GNU parted does distinguish between hfs+ and hfsx, but mount will not mount hfsx volumes, journaled or not. There is also the issue of 10.7's Core Storage, Apple's logical volume manager. Volumes, encrypted or not, using Core Storage, are obscured from linux. I will not be surprised to see Apple move to Core Storage based encrypted disks using jhfsx by default in 10.8, assuming they don't come up with an entirely new file system by then.

Chris Murphy