Re: [RFC] Maintainership of the EFS filesystem

[Jori Koolstra]

On Fri, Jun 05, 2026 at 09:52:19PM -0500, Maxwell Doose wrote:
> Hi Christian, Al,
> 
> I recently sent a patch for the EFS filesystem [1]. While writing that
> patch, which fixed code that was now incompatible with the latest GCC
> (+ an undefined variable), I discovered that the EFS filesystem was
> orphaned and without a maintainer. I inquired with Andrew Morton, the
> person who merged my patch, about potentially taking over
> maintainership for EFS. He noted that he was fine with it [2], and he
> directed me to Christian regarding this possibility. As the subject
> suggests, I'd like to take over maintainership of EFS, if it's fine
> with you all.
> 

Hi!

Thanks for looking into EFS. I am not sure whether it makes sense to
have a maintainer for just EFS. The only reason this (and some other)
old filesystems are still in tree is because we don't really know much
about their users. Linux strongly emphasizes stability of user space, so
we don't just rip them out. Ideally, they should be replaced with a FUSE
driver and removed, but no one has stepped up to do this (for good
reasons).

What would perhaps make sense is to have someone maintain API
compatibility for all old filesystems, to unburden the vfs maintainers.
This maintainer would just be focused on ensuring that modern API is
ported, so that the old stuff can be removed. But that does require some
expertise while it might not add much.

Thanks,
Jori.
> -- 
> best regards.
> max
> 
> [1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/25-new.git/tree/patches/fs-efs-remove-unneeded-debug-prints.patch
> [2] https://lore.kernel.org/mm-commits/20260605193524.f277071da69189161e84e327@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/