Read-Only Apple File-System Support Is Being Worked On For The Linux Kernel (APFS)

The past few years Apple has been developing APFS as the successor to the long-used HFS+ file-system. The Apple File-System is in use with macOS 10.13+ iOS 10.3, and their other platforms for offering a lot of features not found in HFS+ including much better performance. There is an open-source APFS kernel driver now under development for Linux in supporting this file-system.

To date we haven't seen much activity for supporting this Apple File-System on Linux. The only other implementation previously has been a commercial, closed-source APFS Linux driver. But it turns out an open-source kernel module has been in the works and eventually could make it into the mainline kernel.

Before getting too excited though, this APFS Linux kernel module at least for now is only focused on read-only support but that is still quite good if wanting to recover files from an Apple partition. The Linux APFS module supports most of the file-system's features but no handling yet for data compression or encryption.

At this stage the support is good enough the developers are interested in the community for help testing out this code. The code is currently based on Linux 4.20 and can be found via this GitHub repo. Hopefully this code will end up making it to the mainline kernel in the not too distant future.