On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 11:15:49AM -0400, Paul Moore wrote:

Also good to know, thanks.  However, at this point the lack of a clear
answer is making me wonder a bit more about inode numbers in the view
of VFS developers; do you folks care about inode numbers?

The VFS itself does not care much about inode numbers.  The Posix API
does, although btrfs ignores that and seems to get away with that
(mostly because applications put in btrfs-specific hacks).  Various
other non-native file systems that don't support real inodes numbers
also get away with that, but usually the applications used on those
file systems are very limited.