Re: [RFC] Maintainership of the EFS filesystem

[Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>]

On Fri, Jun 05, 2026 at 09:21:12PM -0700, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 05, 2026 at 11:02:44PM -0500, Maxwell Doose wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 5, 2026 at 10:44 PM Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > As I said, I don't see the point.  Do you have any EFS filesystems?
> > 
> > I don't personally have any EFS filesystems but that doesn't mean that
> > others don't.
> > 
> > > Are you volunteering to do any major development on it?
> > 
> > Like I said, we've already found some problems, and like I said I'd
> > like to fix those before it becomes a FUSE as you suggested. So I
> > guess I'll volunteer to do some major development for it as well.
> > 
> > > Why shouldn't we just delete it?
> > 
> > Because in my eyes it's an awful practice to just delete something
> > overnight (probably not your plan but still), I think we need to have
> > some maintenance for some time before this gets removed.
> 
> How do you plan to do QA with the EFS driver?  Is there a mkfs or fsck
> program for it?  I don't see one in Debian, though I didn't search that
> hard.

If we can delete it, I would prefer to delete it. Less code is almost
always better. I also don't think the maintenance burden is minor. We
really only get away with that stance because we continue refusing to
allow block-based fsed to be mounted in users namespaces. It's so
trivial to find on-disk image bugs for non-actively maintained fses
that I don't see the point in keeping them around unless there's an
actual future for them.