On Thu, Dec 19, 2019 at 09:28:23AM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 9:46 PM Amir Goldstein <amir73il@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > I don't think there is a clear policy about being friendly to testing > > less that master kernels in xfstest (Eryu?), but IMO we should try to > > accommodate > > this use case, because it is in the best interest of everyone that stable kernel > > will be regularly tested with xfstests with as little noisy failures > > as possible. > > I think what makes this one particularly hard is that there are most likely > people that do care about the failure on older kernels being reported and > would rather backport the kernel changes into their product kernels > to have them behave sanely. > > I'm also not sure if we could just backport the changes to stable > kernels after all. > > Greg, do you have an opinion on whether the 19 patches from > v5.3-rc6 to cba465b4f982 can be considered stable material? > > The best argument that I have seen in favor of treating it as a bugfix > is that the posx man pages require that "The file's relevant timestamp shall > be set to the greatest value supported by the file system that is not greater > than the specified time"[1], and this is something that Linux has always > done wrong before the series (we overflow and underflow out-of-range > arguments to a value that is both file system and CPU architecture > specific). > > The main argument against backporting would be that 19 patches > is too much, I think each patch in the series would qualify on its own. > Changing the layout of 'struct super_block' also breaks the module > binary interface, which will annoy some distros that care about this, > but I don't think it's stopping us from adding the patch to a stable > kernel. > > Arnd > > [1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/futimens.html Ugh, that's a mess. Why not just use 5.4 if people really care about this type of thing? But yes, on their own, each individual patch would be fine for stable, it's just that I would want someone to "own" the backport and testing of such a thing. If for no other reason than to have someone to "blame" for when things go wrong and get them to fix up the fallout :) Who really really wants this in their older kernels? And are those same people already taking all of the stable updates for those kernels as well? thanks, greg k-h
