On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 3:58 PM David Howells <dhowells@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Hi Linus, > > I have three sets of patches I'd like to push your way, if you (and Al) are > willing to consider them. The basic problem in my view, is that the performance requirement of a "get filesystem information" type of API just does not warrant a binary coded interface. I've said this a number of times, but it fell on deaf ears. Such binary ABIs (especially if not very carefully designed and reviewed) usually go through several revisions as the structure fails to account for future changes in the representation of those structure fields. There are too many examples of this to count. Then there's the problem of needing to update libc, utilities and language bindings on each revision or extension of the interface. All this could be solved with a string key/value representation of the same data, with minimal performance loss on encoding/parsing. The proposed fs interface[1] is one example of that, but I could also imagine a syscall based one too. Thanks, Miklos [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/20200309200238.GB28467@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
