Re: [PATCH 05/24] xfs/031: make sure we don't set rtinherit=1 on mkfs

Christoph Hellwig
2020-09-17T16:08:28Z

On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 08:57:47AM -0700, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 08:53:51AM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 06:43:27PM -0700, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> > > From: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
> > >
> > > mkfs.xfs does not support setting rtinherit on the root directory /and/
> > > pre-populating the filesystem with protofiles, so don't run this test if
> > > rtinherit is in the mkfs options.
> >
> > That is a bit of a weird limitation. Any reason we can't fix this in
> > mkfs instead?
>
> Userspace doesn't implement the rt allocator at all, and the last few
> times I've tried to do any serious surgery in the protofile code, Dave
> grumbled that we should just kill it off instead.

Maybe killing it off is indeed the better option. And in that case this
patch to disable it for RT devices would be a good start.

>
> Do people actually /use/ protofile support? Do they like it? Or would
> they rather have an option like mke2fs -D, where you point it at a
> directory and it uses ftw to copy-in all the files in that directory
> tree, attributes and all?

I always found the protofile stuff really weird and not actually useful.

mke2fs -D actually does seem useful if you want to generate an xfs
file systems and fill it without having admin privileges. I think that
is what the mke2fs feature is used for.