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Rozycki" , Andrei Vagin , Wei Yang , Bhavik Sachdev , Andrew Morton , Wang Yan , Bala-Vignesh-Reddy , Malaya Kumar Rout , linux-doc@vger.kernel.org, linux-mips@vger.kernel.org, linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kselftest@vger.kernel.org, Luis de Bethencourt , Salah Triki , Jonathan Corbet , Madhavan Srinivasan , Alexander Viro Subject: Re: [PATCH] bfs: remove the filesystem Message-ID: References: <20260904082954.48738-1-enelsonmoore@gmail.com> X-Mailing-List: linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org List-Id: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Archive: , List-Subscribe: , , List-Unsubscribe: Precedence: list MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: On Fri, Sep 04, 2026 at 09:51:10AM +0100, Tigran Aivazian wrote: > Hi Ethan, > > On Fri, 4 Sept 2026 at 09:30, Ethan Nelson-Moore wrote: > > > > BFS (not to be confused with BeFS, the BeOS filesystem) is the > > filesystem UnixWare uses for its boot partition. It has extremely > > limited functionality, only supporting contiguous files and no > > subdirectories. Even though the bfs driver is very small and is > > unlikely to cause future maintenance problems, given that the only type > > of data stored on such a partition is likely to be kernels and > > bootloader settings, there is very little reason anyone would want to > > access it from Linux. Other old Unix filesystems (efs, freevxfs) have > > been removed recently, and bfs is highly unlikely to have any users, so > > remove it as well. Retain the UAPI header to be safe. > > > > You are right that probably no one would want to use BFS for storing > the actual data today. > But some things have didactical value, rather than mere pragmatic > usage. It is the didactic > value of MINIX (and its limitations wrt making use of the wonderful > capabilities of i386) that > has originally triggered the creation of Linux. But back to BFS: it is > actually used in Steve Pate's > book "Linux Filesystems" (2024, unfinished yet), which is a sequel to > his excellent classic > "UNIX Filesystems" (2003), as an illustration of a particularly simple > filesystem implementation. Oh wow! :) Nice to hear a new linux book is coming, as a fellow author [fighting my way through the editing stage atm :)] that's good to hear. (I also learned, the hard way, why people don't tend to write kernel books these days - the modern kernel is too damn big! :) > > I remember when Linus accepted my patch with BFS on 28 October 1999 > into 2.3.25 his comment > was: "this appears to be a particularly simple one". :)) nice! We shouldn't be afraid to remove stuff that is less maintained or that causes maintenance overhead or other headaches (e.g. blocking things from being developed), as I have often pointed out re: older architectures, nommu etc. But I'm not sure if any of that applies here or not, so really one for VFS maintainers I think. > > Kind regards, > Tigran -- Cheers, Lorenzo