On Sat, May 28, 2022 at 02:59:31PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > +linux-ext4 > > On Sat, May 28, 2022 at 03:36:39PM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote: > > The other filesystem that uses nobh is the standalone ext2 > > filesystem that nobody uses anymore as the ext4 module provides ext2 > > functionality for distros these days. Hence there's an argument that > > can be made for removing fs/ext2 as well. In which case, the whole > > nobh problem goes away by deprecating and removing both the > > filesysetms that use that infrastructure in 2 years time.... > > This got brought up at this past week's ext4 video chat, where Willy > asked Jan (who has been maintaining ext2) whether he would be open to > converting ext2 to use iomap. The answer was yes. So once jfs and > ext2 are converted, we'll be able to nuke the nobh code. > > From Willy's comments on the video chat, my understanding is that jfs > was even simpler to convert that ext2, and this allows us to remove > the nobh infrastructure without asking the question about whether it's > time to remove jfs. I disagree there - if we are changing code that has been unchanged for a decade or more, there are very few users of that code, and there's a good chance that data corruption regressions will result from the changes being proposed, then asking the question "why take the risk" is very pertinent. "Just because we can" isn't a good answer. The best code is code we don't have to write and maintain. If it's a burden to maintain and a barrier to progress, then we should seriously be considering removing it, not trying to maintain the fiction that it's a viable supported production quality filesystem that people can rely on.... > > > We also need to convert more filesystems to use iomap. > > > > We also need to deprecate and remove more largely unmaintained and > > unused filesystems. :) > > Well, Dave Kleikamp is still around and sends jfs pull requests from > time to time, and so it's not as unmaintained as, say, fs/adfs, > fs/freevxs, fs/hpfs, fs/minix, and fs/sysv. Yes, but the changes that have been made over the past decade are all small and minor - there's been no feature work, no cleanup work, no attempt to update core infrastructure, etc. There's beeen no serious attempts to modernise or update the code for a decade... > As regards to minixfs, I'd argue that ext2 is a better reference file > system than minixfs. So..... are we ready to remove minixfs? I could > easily see that some folks might still have sentimental attachment to > minixfs. :-) AFAIC, yes, minixfs and and those other ones should have been deprecated long ago.... Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
