[ANNOUNCE] HFS+ driver

[Roman Zippel]

Hi,

I'm proud to announce a complete new version of the HFS+ fs driver. This 
work was made possible by Ardis Technologies (www.ardistech.com). It's 
based on the driver by Brad Boyer (http://sf.net/projects/linux-hfsplus).

The new driver now supports full read and write access. Perfomance has 
improved a lot, the btrees are kept in the page cache with a hash on top 
of this to speed up the access to the btree nodes.
I also added support for hard links and the resource fork is accessible 
via <file>/rsrc.

This is a beta release. I tested this a lot, so I consider it quite safe 
to use, but I can't give any guarantees at this time of course. There is 
also still a bit to do (e.g. the block allocator needs a bit more work).

The driver can be downloaded from http://www.ardistech.com/hfsplus/ .
The README describes how to build the driver.

If something should go wrong, I also have patch for Apple's diskdev_cmds 
(available from http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.2.5/), 
which ports newfs_hfs and fsck_hfs to Linux and fixes the endian problems. 
The patch is at http://www.ardistech.com/hfsplus/diskdev_cmds.diff.gz . 
After applying the patch the tools can be built with 'make -f 
Makefile.lnx'.

bye, Roman