Re: [RFC] Maintainership of the EFS filesystem

[Mateusz Guzik]

On Sat, Jun 06, 2026 at 12:17:53AM -0500, Maxwell Doose wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 5, 2026 at 11:28 PM Maxwell Doose <m32285159@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > 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?
> > >
> 
> Forgot to answer this; I've been looking through the files and already
> found more ifdefs but also a lot of style issues, most notably
> trailing whitespace (eek!). I'm still auditing the files but it's 1am
> over here so I'm going to continue in the morning.
> 

A glance at your patch history suggests you are not tied to EFS in any
capacity. By your admission you don't even use it.

It seems like you are just looking for an area to contribute to and
figured EFS would make a good choice.

I would argue EFS is an excellent candidate for git rm instead. Nobody
knows if it even works. Even if it happens to work and it gets removed,
the absolute worst case for anyone interested in extracting data from
EFS is having to boot up a vm with an older kernel to do it. I think
that's something the (likely non-existent) users can live with.

Note there is no write support.

I did a quick search and found the following userspace tooling:
https://github.com/sgi-demos/sgi-efs2tar
https://github.com/jkbenaim/efsextract

I have no idea if it works, presumably it does (and better than the
kernel module).

So... I don't believe there is any practical value in keeping the fs,
even for hobbyists.

Perhaps you could submit a removal instead.

If you are looking for something to do, there is plenty of non-obsolete
code suffering all kinds of breakage. All it takes is picking an area
and digging into it.