Re: [PATCH] bfs: remove the filesystem

On Fri, Sep 04, 2026 at 08:10:54AM -0700, Darrick J. Wong wrote:

On Fri, Sep 04, 2026 at 12:43:09PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:

quoted

On Fri, 04 Sep 2026 01:29:19 -0700, Ethan Nelson-Moore wrote:

quoted

bfs: remove the filesystem

I agree.

At the moment, I don't.  Nowhere in this thread does anyone mention what
someone with a B(oot)FS filesystem image should do if they want to
extract whatever's stored in the filesystem.  Are there userspace tools
for that purpose (ala efs)?  Does "binwalk -e $bfs_image" suffice for
that purpose?  Or is there solid evidence that there isn't even a single
user (ala freevxfs) who strongly wants it to stay in?

I'm all for getting rid of old cruft but there still needs to be a
documented offramp for users.

Use an older/downstream version of linux? :)

It's like the museum piece arch stuff - people argue vigorously in favour of
nommu (which btw is a variety of linux that _doesn't implement forking_ :)))
gesticulating at talks given at conferences etc.

But then never quite answer the 'why not use an older version of linux' or 'why
not just maintain it downstraem for the 3 people who need it'.

Also worth consider what the Venn diagram overlap of bfs users and people
running even-vaguely-tip kernels/likely to ever upgrade is. Quite likely zero I
expect?

I get the desire not to lose people their data, but the code's not gone away
forever :)

--D

quoted

---

Applied to the vfs-7.4.bfs branch of the vfs/vfs.git tree.
Patches in the vfs-7.4.bfs branch should appear in linux-next soon.

Please report any outstanding bugs that were missed during review in a
new review to the original patch series allowing us to drop it.

It's encouraged to provide Acked-bys and Reviewed-bys even though the
patch has now been applied. If possible patch trailers will be updated.

Note that commit hashes shown below are subject to change due to rebase,
trailer updates or similar. If in doubt, please check the listed branch.

tree:   https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/vfs/vfs.git
branch: vfs-7.4.bfs

[1/1] bfs: remove the filesystem
      https://git.kernel.org/vfs/vfs/c/e36781a626b2

--
Cheers, Lorenzo