Working around ext4 on MacOS
One of the maddening things about MacOS is that it lacks ext4 file system support. This is a bummer because I use ext4 on many of my external hard drives as well as boot volumes for various headless Linux machines. Once in a while, these boot drives become corrupted (due to user error) and I find myself wanting to mount the file system on another system to repair the error. Ideally I can just pop it in a SATA<->USB adapter and mount it on my Mac, but alas…
There is a read-only ext4 FUSE driver for MacOS installable via Homebrew, but that’s not going to help us repair a bad volume. I could install some virtual machine manager, bootstrap a machine, figure out how to share the host USB devices, etc, but that seems like a lot of work. If I recall correctly, there are also paid ext4 FUSE drivers, but I’m cheap.
What has worked for me is connecting the disk to a Raspberry Pi via my
SATA<->USB adapter, SSHing onto the Pi from my MacBook, and mounting the drive
that way. And in case of long-running processes (like reformatting the drive),
to avoid the MacBook falling asleep or anything else that might drop the SSH
session, we can use nohup to keep the process alive (e.g., sudo nohup mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sda1).
Of course, SSHing through a Raspberry Pi is only convenient if you have a Raspberry Pi up and running and configured for SSH already. For everyone else, Virtual Box is probably the way to go.