Re: [MAINTAINERS/KERNEL SUMMIT] Trust and maintenance of file systems

Christoph Hellwig
2023-09-08T08:38:29Z

On Thu, Sep 07, 2023 at 08:54:38AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> There's a bigger policy question around that.
>
> I think that if we are going to have filesystems be "community
> maintained" because they have no explicit maintainer, we need some
> kind of standard policy to be applied.
>
> I'd argue that the filesystem needs, at minimum, a working mkfs and
> fsck implementation, and that it is supported by fstests so anyone
> changing core infrastructure can simply run fstests against the
> filesystem to smoke test the infrastructure changes they are making.

Yes, that's what I tried to imply above. We could relax fsck a bit
(even if that is playing fast and lose), but without mkfs there is
no way anyone can verify anything

>
> I'd suggest that syzbot coverage of such filesystems is not desired,
> because nobody is going to be fixing problems related to on-disk
> format verification. All we really care about is that a user can
> read and write to the filesystem without trashing anything.

Agreed.

> I'd also suggest that we mark filesystem support state via fstype
> flags rather than config options. That way we aren't reliant on
> distros setting config options correctly to include/indicate the
> state of the filesystem implementation. We could also use similar
> flags for indicating deprecation and obsolete state (i.e. pending
> removal) and have code in the high level mount path issue the
> relevant warnings.

Agreed.

> This method of marking would also allow us to document and implement
> a formal policy for removal of unmaintained and/or obsolete
> filesystems without having to be dependent on distros juggling
> config variables to allow users to continue using deprecated, broken
> and/or obsolete filesystem implementations right up to the point
> where they are removed from the kernel.

I'd love to get there, but that might be a harder sell.