A Closed-Source Apple File-System APFS Driver For Linux Announced

[Snaipersky]

How can they make this an in-kernel driver and not have it be GPL?

Same as any other "binary" driver. It's a kernel module, but not sitting in the mainline repository. Think Nvidia's proprietary driver.

[AsuMagic]

How can they make this an in-kernel driver and not have it be GPL?

Same as the nvidia proprietary driver, I assume.

[FireBurn]

How can they make this an in-kernel driver and not have it be GPL?

[labyrinth153]

My external hard drive is formatted as encrypted apfs. Currently it does not work on encrypted fusion drives as far as I know.

[andyprough]

Bulk of Paragon customers are in the embedded market. As in "company that makes embedded devices and need a driver to read disks formatted by something else".

People on Mac don't use Fat32 on external hard drives.

Makes sense regarding why Paragon would work on this driver. I've not been handed an external hard drive by a Mac user, but plenty of flash drives. The flash drives were all FAT32 as far as I can recall.

[GI_Jack]

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I can't imagine ever having to read from or write to an Apple-formatted disk. Never had to mount an HFS or HFS+ disk. I don't recall anyone ever doing work on a Mac and passing it to me on a specially formatted drive. Don't all the Mac folks just use FAT32 on their thumb drives?

The market is for recovery operations. This is why its important to have drivers for all popular operation systems.

Someone breaks a mac, and either you need to boot in with a livecd, or you need to put the HD in an external system for recovery.

[starshipeleven]

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I can't imagine ever having to read from or write to an Apple-formatted disk. Never had to mount an HFS or HFS+ disk. I don't recall anyone ever doing work on a Mac and passing it to me on a specially formatted drive. Don't all the Mac folks just use FAT32 on their thumb drives?

Bulk of Paragon customers are in the embedded market. As in "company that makes embedded devices and need a driver to read disks formatted by something else".

People on Mac don't use Fat32 on external hard drives.

[garegin]

can you use APFS on spinning drives? As far as I looked up, you can't. Is this something in the works? BTW, kudos to Apple to ditching HFS+, it was a REALLY bad FS.

[andyprough]

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I can't imagine ever having to read from or write to an Apple-formatted disk. Never had to mount an HFS or HFS+ disk. I don't recall anyone ever doing work on a Mac and passing it to me on a specially formatted drive. Don't all the Mac folks just use FAT32 on their thumb drives?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Closed-Source Apple File-System APFS Driver For Linux Announced

With macOS High Sierra finally ditching the HFS+ file-system and switching all macOS users over to Apple's new file-system, APFS, you may find the need to read a APFS file-system from another non-macOS device. Now it's possible with an APFS Linux file-system driver, but it's closed-source and doesn't yet have write capabilities...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=APFS-Linux-Driver-Announced