Re: [PATCH, 3.7-rc7, RESEND] fs: revert commit bbdd6808 to fallocate UAPI

Theodore Ts'o
2012-12-06T16:50:41Z

On Thu, Dec 06, 2012 at 07:06:45AM -0500, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>
> Also the only conference outcome I remember is that everyone at LSF
> except for Ted basically said "no fucking way".
>

At LSF, that's correct. And as a result, the people who need this --
Google and Tao Bao -- have decided to keep the patch as an out-of-tree
patch, much like the Android wakelock patch was out of tree, and for
similar reasons --- because the community has rejected the
functionality.

At this point, I've only asked that the bit be reserved, so we don't
have to worry about codepoint collisions. (We'd have the same issue
with an ioctl, BTW --- we would need to reserve an ioctl number to
avoid collisions, although granted there are ways to cleverly choose
an ioctl number that would reduce the chance of collisions even if it
isn't formally reserved.)

Note that this is not a kernel fork the same way the android wakelock
is not a kernel fork. It's an out of tree patch which has been
rejected by upstream.

- Ted