Re: [PATCH V10 00/10] famfs: port into fuse

[Miklos Szeredi]

On Wed, 15 Apr 2026 at 02:16, Darrick J. Wong <djwong@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Oh believe me, I had much angrier things to say elsewhere in 2023-24
> about grueling slowass reviews.  That is, indirectly, why I'm now
> working on /this/ project. :(

I've been there too.  Which is not an excuse to be an unresponsive
maintainer, but that's unfortunately exactly what seems to have
happened.

On the positive side, I really appreciate the energy all of you put
into improving fuse.

Some of the reasons for the lack of progress:

- Fuse has grown, and I don't have a full understanding of it, even
some of the core.  Getting older doesn't help, I'm sure I would've
handled this better 20 years ago.  Currently working on some cleanups,
progress is slow, will post the next batch shortly.  Cleaning it up
helps in multiple ways: a) I get to know the code better, b) adding
new stuff becomes easier.

- The fuse-iomap change is HUGE.  By line count it's some 40% of
current fuse code.  By comparison, when fuse was merged it was
3.5kloc.  It doesn't mean I wouldn't like to have it.  On the
contrary, I think it's a very useful feature and would solve the long
time issue with having a way to mount untrusted fs images with
reasonable performance.

- There's no such problem with famfs, it's relatively small and self
contained and I'd consider it ready (barring any roadblocks on the DAX
side).  But the famfs specific mapping interface is something that I
never did like.  Joanne offered to fix this, and I totally agree with
her that we should not hurriedly add interfaces that will need to be
kept for ever (yes, sometimes even API's are deprecated and removed,
but it's much much more painful).

How can this situation be improved?

A dedicated co-maintainer would definitely help, not sure how it would
work out in the fuse case.  With overlayfs I think it works nicely (at
least that's my impression, not sure what Amir thinks ;)

My experience is that face to face discussions at LSFMM will also help
move things forward.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,
Miklos