Re: [GIT PULL] overlayfs fixes for 4.9-rc3

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Sat Nov 05 2016 - 13:42:04 EST


On Fri, Nov 4, 2016 at 11:44 PM, Amir Goldstein <amir73il@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Can you please clarify your objection?

There are several:

- timing. No way in hell will I take a new feature like this during an rc

- lack of explanation. Why is this bad feature needed in the first
place? Why would overlayfs versioning _ever_ be a good idea?

- is the implementation even sane? Right now I don't think overlayfs
even requires xattr support in the upper filesystem, so the whole
concept seems frankly totally misdesigned.

> I suppose you do not object to the concept of on-disk format version nor on-disk
> format compatible/incompatible features sets.

I object both to the concept and to the implementation and to the
timing. The thing seems broken. Doing it during the rc cycle makes it
doubly so.

> Just to fact that overlayfs didn't have those form day one, so it
> should find a way to cope with that situation without patching
> stable kernels?

What "situation"? There's no f*cking explanation of why we'd even want
this crap. Not in the commit message, not in the pull request, not
*anywhere*.

And then the commit marks that shit for stable? When it clearly
doesn't fix anything, and it has never ever been needed before?

NO.

Linus