Re: [RFC] Maintainership of the EFS filesystem

[Maxwell Doose]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2026 at 11:21 PM Al Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.
>
> Out of curiosity - had there been anything beside the "some code that
> had been ifdefed out since forever doesn't even build these days"
> I've seen mentioned a while ago?
>
> FWIW, I've no preferences re efs fate; a simple block-based r/o filesystem
> is not a serious burden, provided that there's somebody to take care of
> conversions on API changes (mount options parsing work, stuff like that).
> However, that really assumes that there's some way to test such changes.
>
> So the first question is whether such images can be found.  If not, there's
> no point whatsoever - neither in kernel nor in userland.  If they are available,
> it might make a useful learning experience...

After a quick google search (and take this with a grain of salt), the
utilities to do so are not compatible whatsoever with modern versions
of Linux, however it is possible to emulate the environment in which
one could create an image. I would also guess that images for EFS
filesystems, disks, etc have been archived on the internet.