Support for case-sensitive HFS+?

[dc1847]

Mac OS X 10.3 Server has the option of formatting a mac hard disk with a case-sensitive variant of HFS+, known as HFSX. (Details at Apple.) This filesystem variant has proven to be useful while doing Unix-ish development in the Mac OS. (Anyone ever tried to call a source directory "cvs" while using Mac OS? Good times...)

Unfortunately, since HFSX uses a different magic number in the volume header ("HX" instead of "H+"), the hfsplus filesystem modules do not recognize case-sensitive HFS+ partitions as being valid. (Mount, for instance, will give a standard "bad superblock" error message.)

Does anyone know if the current utilities support HFSX? I have not found any obvious commands, switches, options, etc., but obviously, I might have overlooked something. If not, are there any plans amongst the HFS+ developers to support this? I have no experience with the details of the hfsplus kernel module, any of the other HFS+ utilities, or of the guts of the HFS+/HFSX filesystem format itself. So, I have no idea if this would be a major undertaking or not.

If this is not an urgent task, the easy and tedious solution would of course be to reformat the Mac OS partition as a standard case-insensitive HFS+ filesystem. In this case, maybe a notice could be put somewhere in the Gentoo PPC FAQ's mentioning that HFSX is not yet supported?

--doug

[SeJo]

Hi there,

as far as i can see the HFS+ is indeed not supported, if we should put it on our FAQ that seems to bee a question of opinions. Reason: we don't maintain hpfs utils, the program is simply available on Gentoo but not part of Gentoo!
If we would implement all faq's of all apps we have available we would have to create a faq with the size of some milions of pages.

greetings

Jochen