Does anyone still need to create legacy HFS filesystems?

[John Reiser]

> Are you sure you mean HFS? The original maximum volume size for Mac OS Standard (HFS) format, was 2GB. The maximum number of allocation blocks is 65,536. For a 100GB disk, your allocation block would need to be 1.6MB. Considering Mac OS X 10.7, today's current Apple operating system, is optimized for 4K allocation block sizes, the performance and efficiency of a 1.6MB allocation block would be hideous.

Examining with gparted and Disk Utility, I see an Apple partition label
that designates partitions:

  HFS (not plus)       1 MB  boot
  HFS+ journalled   25.6 GB  Machintosh HD
  ext3              10.6 GB  Fedora root
  swap               1.0 GB

I believe that the plain HFS boot partition was created during
Fedora install.  It's now running MacOS 10.4.11 and Fedora 12,
which are both the latest applicable releases.  Being a PowerPC,
Apple discontinued support beginning with MacOS 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
in spring 2010.

> HFS is dead. I'm not even finding a partition type GUID for it, it was always intended to be used with the APM partitioning scheme (not MDB or GPT).

PowerPC Macintosh hardware will run for some more years.
The monetary cost for a used machine (1GB RAM, >1GHz CPU)
is nearly zero.  A "dead" Apple OS has the benefit of no new bugs.
Preventing the install of Fedora on such a box (if creating a
plain HFS is required for dual boot) seems to be a harsh penalty.

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