Re: Serious problems with HFS+

[Rogério Brito]

On Mar 13 2005, Matt Mackall wrote:
> I've noticed a few problems with HFS+ support in recent kernels on
> another user's machine running Ubuntu (Warty) running 2.6.8.1-3-powerpc.

I also saw some of the things that you reported with Debian proper (sarge).
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to use my HFS+ formatted system with
Linux for a while, I may do so, if necessary to fix the bugs.

> I'm not in a position to extensively test or fix either of these problem
> because of the fs tools situation so I'm just passing this on.

I, OTOH, can test fixes on the next weekend, since I have a full backup
scheduled for this week.

> First, it reports inappropriate blocks to stat(2). It uses 4096 byte
> blocks rather than 512 byte blocks which stat callers are expecting.
> This seriously confuses du(1) (and me, for a bit). Looks like it may
> be forgetting to set s_blocksize_bits.

I had not noticed what are the size of the blocks that HFS+ seems to use,
but indeed I saw both very confused du and ls outputs. I don't know what
may be the cause.

> Second, if an HFS+ filesystem mounted via Firewire or USB becomes
> detached, the filesystem appears to continue working just fine.

That's the only way that I am using a HFS+ fs (fia Firewire or USB), since
the drive in question is in an enclosure.

> I can find on the entire tree, despite memory pressure. I can even create
> new files that continue to appear in directory listings! Writes to
> such files succeed (they're async, of course) and the typical app is
> none the wiser. It's only when apps attempt to read later that they
> encounter problems. It turns out that various apps including scp
> ignore IO errors on read and silently copy zero-filled files to the
> destination. So I got this report as "why aren't the pictures I took
> off my camera visible on my website?"

I haven't seen this behaviour for lack of testing, but I will try to
reproduce it with an HFS+ fs on a file mounted via loopback.

> This is obviously a really nasty failure mode. At the very least, open
> of new files should fail with -EIO. Preferably the fs should force a
> read-only remount on IO errors. Given that the vast majority of HFS+
> filesystems Linux is likely to be used with are on hotpluggable media,
> I think this FS should be marked EXPERIMENTAL until such integrity
> problems are addressed.

I agree. This is, indeed, very scary.


Just another data point, Rogério.

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  Rogério Brito - rbrito@xxxxxxxxxx - http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito
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