Re: Volunteering for BeFS maintainership

[Luis de Bethencourt <luisbg@osg.samsung.com>]

On 27/07/16 04:05, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 09:30:13PM +0100, Luis de Bethencourt wrote:
>>>
>>> Sounds great!  Do you have a git tree set up for your befs development?
>>
>> Yes, I have the following in github (if that is OK):
>> https://github.com/luisbg/linux-befs
>>
>> I have two branches there based on Linus' master:
>>  - befs-linus: with patches Andrew Morton has approved
>>  - befs-next: with patches I've tested but that remain under review
> 
> So it sounds like you plan to send patches through Andrew's tree.

Not sure. Whatever Andrew, Al, Greg and yourself think is better.

> That works fine, although if you end up sending a larger number of
> patches through the linux-mm tree, it might make sense for you to send
> patches to Linus directly.  So if you have a chance to get a GPG key
> which is signed by people in the Kernel keyring, that would be a good
> preparation for that eventuality.  That will require face-to-face
> verification of your identity by people who are already in the GPG web
> of trust, so it's good to plan for that in advance.

I will be at ELCE in 3 months [0]. It will be a good opportunity to get my
GPG key signed by people in the Kernel keyring. For example Maxime Ripard,
who is one of the speakers and in the GPG web of trust [1].

> 
>> It would be amazing to have a framework to run xfstests in a GCE VM.
> 
> Please see:
> 
>        https://thunk.org/gce-xfstests
> 
> and
> 
> 	https://github.com/tytso/xfstests-bld/blob/master/README.md
> 
> for more information.

Very nice. Looking forward to playing with it soon, and adding it to my
development process. I have learned a lot reading the ext4 code so I am
also interested in running the test suite with that.

> 
> I plan to do some work to make it simpler to get started using
> gce-xfstests.  (Specifically, so you don't have to build the tree and
> generate your own GCE image, but instead using a premade one.)

I will watch out for updates on this on fstests@vger.

> 
> Are there userspace tools available to create and consistency check
> BeFS file systems?  If so, I can try to get those included into the
> test appliance image.  (Better yet, if you can arrange to have someone
> create a debian package for BeFStools, that would be great.)
> 
> 						- Ted

Support for BeFS in Linux is read-only. So there are no tools to create
BeFS file systems. I have a bunch of BeFS images created from Haiku OS
that cover most things. 

There is no reason a consistency check tool can't be written. I think this
could be a fun exercise, I am tempted to add it to my task list :)
However this tool can only inform if the file system is consistent, and not
really fix it.  Similar to "e2fsck -n".

Salah told me he is planning to slowly work on adding read support in the
future. But don't want to make any promises/plans on his behalf.

Thanks,
Luis



[0] http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/embedded-linux-conference-europe/program/schedule
[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/ksmap/