Re: [PATCH v2] f2fs: another way to set large folio by remembering inode number

[Theodore Tso]

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

> 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?

					- Ted