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

Guenter Roeck
2023-09-07T12:57:49Z

On 9/7/23 04:18, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> On 07.09.23 12:29, Christian Brauner wrote:
>>> So why can't that work similarly for unmaintained file systems? We could
>>> even establish the rule that Linus should only apply patches to some
>>> parts of the kernel if the test suite for unmaintained file systems
>>> succeeded without regressions. And only accept new file system code if a
>>
>> Reading this mail scared me.
>
> Sorry about that, I can fully understand that. It's just that some
> statements in this thread sounded a whole lot like "filesystems want to
> opt-out of the no regression rule" to me. That's why I at some point
> thought I had to speak up.
>
>> The list of reiserfs bugs alone is crazy.
>
> Well, we regularly remove drivers or even support for whole archs
> without getting into conflict with the "no regressions" rule, so I'd say
> that should be possible for file systems as well.
>
> And I think for reiserfs we are on track with that.
>
> But what about hfsplus? From hch's initial mail of this thread it sounds
> like that is something users would miss. So removing it without a very
> strong need[1] seems wrong to me. That's why I got involved in this
> discussion.
>

The original mail also suggested that there would be essentially no means
to create a hfsplus file system in Linux. That would mean it would, for all
practical purposes, be untestable.

However:

$ sudo apt-get install hfsprogs
$ truncate -s 64M filesystem.hfsplus
$ mkfs.hfsplus filesystem.hfsplus
Initialized filesystem.hfsplus as a 64 MB HFS Plus volume
$ file filesystem.hfsplus
filesystem.hfsplus: Macintosh HFS Extended version 4 data last mounted by: '10.0', created: Thu Sep 7 05:41:21 2023, last modified: Thu Sep 7 12:41:21 2023, last checked: Thu Sep 7 12:41:7

So I am not really sure I understand what the problem actually is.

No a side note, the crash I observed with ntfs3 was introduced by
commit a4f64a300a29 ("ntfs3: free the sbi in ->kill_sb").

Guenter