Re: [PATCH] Remove HFS support

[Daniel Kiper]

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 <dja@axtens.net>

Reviewed-by: Daniel Kiper <daniel.kiper@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.

> ---
>
> `make check` is unchanged except for not running the hfs test any more. 
> However,
> I don't have any macs set up to boot linux with HFS+, so I can't say much 
> more for
> certain. If anyone can check grub-macbless in particular that would be 
> wonderful.

Yeah, that would be prefect. Any volunteers?

Daniel