Does anyone still need to create legacy HFS filesystems?

[Joel Rees]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 7:36 AM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
> On Feb 3, 2012, at 12:06 PM, John Reiser wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> I though you meant a user accessible volume being formatted as HFS.
>
> HFS+ and HFSX volumes must be greater than 32MB, where as HFS supports smaller sizes. As for the purpose of the 1MB HFS volume, it may be a Fedora PPC convention. I have a PowerPC machine dual booting two versions of Mac OS X, and the disk does not have an HFS volume on it. They are jhfs+.

Sort of Fedora convention. Debian can use a larger disk to store the
boot files.

My impression is that the HFS volume made there is primarily for code
that no one wants to fix, and to hide from the user slightly hairy
boot incantations like "boot hd:3,ofwboot /bsd" (per the openbsd boot
incantation for ppc).

I personally would prefer to use ofwboot directly, because Fedora's
gparted doesn't seem to be able to make volumes as small a 1M on disks
larger than 120G or so, and every partition used by Linux for making
things easier on the user is one less that could be used for
multi-boot and such. But I haven't had success guessing which file to
name in the above incantation on Fedora.

--
Joel Rees