On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 02:49:59AM +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:

On Sun, Jul 26, 2020 at 04:18:10PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:

quoted

Zone append is a protocol context that ha not business showing up
in a file system interface.  The right interface is a generic way
to report the written offset for an append write for any kind of file.
So we should pick a better name like FMODE_REPORT_APPEND_OFFSET
(not that I particularly like that name, but it is the best I could
quickly come up with).

Is it necessarily *append*?  There were a spate of papers about ten
years ago for APIs that were "write anywhere and I'll tell you where it
ended up".  So FMODE_ANONYMOUS_WRITE perhaps?

But that really is not the semantics I had in mind - both the semantics
for the proposed Linux file API and the NVMe Zone Append command say
write exactly at the write pointer (NVMe) or end of the file (file API).