On 2026-05-21 11:57 -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:

On Thu, May 21, 2026 at 01:51:08AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:

quoted

quoted

You haven't sent a proposal.  This is a reply to a reply to a reply of a
patch.  There's no justification for why f2fs is so special that it
needs this.  What the hell is going on?  You know this is not the way to
get code merged into Linux.

None of this got properly answers, and this broken interface now landed
in linux-next. IT is offloading a user.* xattr which is free-form
user data with semantics that are weird to say it very nicely.

All this was done against the advice in the mailing list discussion.

So let me get this straight.  This is a magic xattr interface which is
not even persisted in the file system, but instead sets a 32-bit
bitmask in the struct inode which disappears once the inode gets
flushed from the inode stack.  And it uses a generic xattr name,
"user.fadvise".

There's no way in *hell* any other file system is likely to adopt such
a broken interface, so why didn't you just use an ioctl to set this
magic f2fs-specific flag?

quoted

I think at some point we just need to stop taking f2fs updates likes
this.

Well, that's ultiamtely up to Linus.  I'll say that if I were Linus
(and I'm glad I'm not :-), and I saw this in a pull request, I'd
reject it out of hand.  But whether it's worth making a huge fuss and
asking escalating this mess to Linus, we probably should get a bit
more community consensus before taking such a drastic step.

Christian, since you're one of the VFS maintaienrs, what's your
opinion about escalating this to Linus?

I think we don't need to involve Linus.
The interface as is is broken. Using xattrs for this makes no sense
whatsoever.