John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de> writes: >> On Aug 19, 2022, at 3:59 PM, Daniel Kiper <dki...@net-space.pl> wrote: >> >> On Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 11:38:26PM +1000, Daniel Axtens wrote: >>> HFS is so so very old now. According to Wikipedia, HFS was >>> introduced in 1985 and the successor HFS+ came out in January >>> 1998. Mac OS dropped support for writing HFS in 2009 and dropped >>> support for reading HFS in 2019 with macOS 10.15. >>> >>> Grub's support for it doesn't survive contact with a fuzzer, and >>> the issues involve some horrible mess of mutual recursion that >>> would be time-consuming to sort out. >>> >>> HFS has been disabled under lockdown since commit 1c15848838d9 >>> ("fs/hfs: Disable under lockdown") which was part of an earlier >>> spin of security fixes. >>> >>> I think it's time to consign HFS to the dustbin of history. It's >>> firmly in the category of retrocomputing at this stage. >>> >>> This should not affect HFS+. >>> >>> There's a little bit of mess remaining: the macbless runtime >>> command and HFS+ need the HFS headers for embedded volume support. >>> I don't think that's really deployed any more, as it would have >>> been part of the HFS->HFS+ transition, but I'm not really game to >>> mess with either, in particular as macbless writes(!) to disk live. >>> (I'm fairly sure the grub-macbless tool invokes code from the >>> macbless module as well.) >>> >>> Signed-off-by: Daniel Axtens <d...@axtens.net> >> >> Reviewed-by: Daniel Kiper <daniel.ki...@oracle.com> >> >> Daniel, thank you for preparing this patch! >> >> If I do not hear any major objections in the following weeks I will >> merge this patch or a variant of it in the second half of September. > > We’re still formatting our /boot partitions for Debian PowerPC for PowerMacs > using HFS, so this change would be a breaking change for us. >
Really, plain HFS, not HFS+? Wowsers! Just to be clear, by PowerMacs you mean Macs with PowerPC chips, so machines last produced around 2006? Have you checked that you can't boot them with HFS+? Because HFS+ came in 1998, which was (AFAICT) pretty early on in the G3 lifecycle. So I'd be really surprised if the firmware didn't support booting from HFS+. I'd be very keen to hear. Anyway, if I've understood correctly, the _most recent_ PowerMacs date from around 16 years ago, and potentially the machines broken by this would be even older. I still think that's in the domain of retrocomputing and I don't understand the use case for running modern software on something where the performance per watt is worse than a recent raspberry pi. Kind regards, Daniel _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel