Is anyone working on an AFP client for modern macOS? It’s been deprecated since 15.5. A client that can connect to both netatalk and classic mac AFP shares would be ideal. Does this exist?
AFP client for post macOS 15.5 macs
- Thread starter Slimes
- Start date
I'm aware of at least two AFP client projects: afpfs-ng and afp-perl. Both support AFP over TCP, rather than over AppleTalk (i.e. the same as every macOS release has since Mac OS X Tiger.) Both are command-line tools that will run on macOS as well as BSD and Linux systems.
One question is whether your idea of an AFP client means full integration, where mounted server volumes appear in the Finder. That currently requires FUSE support on macOS, which means installing a 3rd-party closed-source kernel extension. Apple has deprecated kernel extensions, but (unlike AFP) has not specified a cutoff release for them yet. MacFUSE would need to get rewritten as a userspace system extension at some point if support for kernel extensions is dropped. A project to do that was started a couple of years ago as FUSE-T, but its development has been sporadic and it has some concerning open issues relating to data corruption and extended attribute support.
The AFP client in macOS Tahoe (26.0.1 as of today) still works fine, and given Apple's expected schedule, it will continue to work fine until the next major OS release in Fall 2026. But the clock is ticking.
One question is whether your idea of an AFP client means full integration, where mounted server volumes appear in the Finder. That currently requires FUSE support on macOS, which means installing a 3rd-party closed-source kernel extension. Apple has deprecated kernel extensions, but (unlike AFP) has not specified a cutoff release for them yet. MacFUSE would need to get rewritten as a userspace system extension at some point if support for kernel extensions is dropped. A project to do that was started a couple of years ago as FUSE-T, but its development has been sporadic and it has some concerning open issues relating to data corruption and extended attribute support.
The AFP client in macOS Tahoe (26.0.1 as of today) still works fine, and given Apple's expected schedule, it will continue to work fine until the next major OS release in Fall 2026. But the clock is ticking.
Agreed. One nice thing about running a Mac OS 9 VM in QEMU is that you don't have to worry about the host system having an AFP client or AppleTalk support, because the guest system supports both. There's also no need to install a kernel extension.
Note: for the Mac OS 9 VM to mount shares over EtherTalk (i.e. servers using AFP versions prior to 3.0), QEMU needs to be running in bridge networking mode rather than the default user mode, so that non-TCP/IP protocol packets can be used. That requires running QEMU as root, which you can do with 'sudo'. But if you only need to mount AFP-over-TCP shares, then the default configuration running as the normal user will work fine.