What's new in ExtendFS 1.2.0
By Kenneth Chew • Posted May 7, 2026
- Hash tree directories are now fully supported. In ext3 or ext4 volumes, a file lookup can use the hash tree to make an initial lookup faster, especially in a directory containing many items.
- Various other performance improvements.
- The
inline_datafeature, where a volume can have small files or directories with its data embedded in the inode, is now supported for reading. - ExtendFS now supports reading files whose name is not encoded in UTF-8. However, note that while ExtendFS may support this, many parts of macOS may not support file names that aren’t valid UTF-8. For example, such files might not appear in the Finder or other user-facing programs at all. However, you should be able to read them via terminal commands.
- Fix an issue where large files on an ext2 volume might not be readable.
- Fix an issue on volumes with the
csum_seedfeature enabled where file reads might fail or directories might incorrectly appear to be empty. - Fix an issue where reads on a sparse file might fail with an input/output error.
- ext2, ext3, and ext4 volumes mounted by ExtendFS are now marked as “true” read-only volumes. Among other improvements, this means that options such as creating new folders and deleting files (which did not do anything if selected) no longer appear in the Finder. This fix requires both updating ExtendFS and updating to macOS 26.5 or later.
You can download the latest version of ExtendFS from the Mac App Store or GitHub.