Re: [PATCH 00/19] VFS: Filesystem information and notifications [ver #16]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 05:04:55PM +0000, David Howells wrote:

Here are a set of patches that adds system calls, that (a) allow
information about the VFS, mount topology, superblock and files to be
retrieved and (b) allow for notifications of mount topology rearrangement
events, mount and superblock attribute changes and other superblock events,
such as errors.

============================
FILESYSTEM INFORMATION QUERY
============================

The first system call, fsinfo(), allows information about the filesystem at
a particular path point to be queried as a set of attributes, some of which
may have more than one value.

Attribute values are of four basic types:

 (1) Version dependent-length structure (size defined by type).

 (2) Variable-length string (up to 4096, including NUL).

 (3) List of structures (up to INT_MAX size).

 (4) Opaque blob (up to INT_MAX size).

I mainly have an organizational question. :) This is a huge patchset
with lots and lots of (good) features. Wouldn't it make sense to make
the fsinfo() syscall a completely separate patchset from the
watch_mount() and watch_sb() syscalls? It seems that they don't need to
depend on each other at all. This would make reviewing this so much
nicer and likely would mean that fsinfo() could proceed a little faster.

Christian