Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] Rename "cifs" module to "smbfs"

[Enzo Matsumiya]

On 08/02, Jeff Layton wrote:
> If the concern is "branding" then I don't see how this really helps.
> Very few users interact with the kernel modules directly.
>
> FWIW, I just called "modprobe smb3" on my workstation and got this:
>
> [ 1223.581583] Key type cifs.spnego registered
> [ 1223.582523] Key type cifs.idmap registered
> [ 1230.411422] Key type cifs.idmap unregistered
> [ 1230.412542] Key type cifs.spnego unregistered
>
> Are you going to rename the keyrings too? That will have implications
> for userland helper programs like cifs.upcall. There's also
> /proc/fs/cifs/*.
>
> These are a "stable interfaces" that you can't just rename at will. If
> you want to change these interfaces then you need to do a formal
> deprecation announcement, and probably a period with /proc/fs/smbfs and
> /proc/fs/cifs coexisting.
>
> There are also a ton of printk's and such that have "CIFS" in them that
> will need to be changed.
>
> These costs do not seem worth the perceived benefit to me. You could
> probably hide a lot of what users see by just renaming (or symlinking)
> mount.cifs to mount.smb3.
>
> I think if you guys are serious about this, you should probably start
> somewhere else besides renaming the directory and module. This is going
> to impact developers (and people who make their living doing backports)
> far more than it will users.

I was thinking about the possible issues of a rename, and my
perspective/assessment of the impact is this:

For devs:
- from running userspace/upcall tools with "cifs" name for a while until
  everything eventually catches up
- not much else, really (enlighten me here please)

For backporters/distros:
- this might *look* like an issue first, because of the name conflicts it
  would arise when backporting fixes to older kernels, but these are
  _just_ a rename, without any functional changes whatsoever. It could
  be backported just fine as well, and customers/end users would still
  see no difference in behaviour

For customers/end users:
- at first, there should be no impact. "cifs" and "smb3" modules aliases
  are kept (and will be for a long while) and nothing else changes
  (procfs entry, idmap/spnego upcalls, mount.cifs, etc stays the same)

A note on backports: I myself (and Paulo) do the backports for our SLE
products, sometimes down to SLE11-SP4 (based on kernel 3.0) and I
could not see what other issues could appear given if we backport this
rename to released products.

Of course, I don't know every process for every distro vendors, so if
someone could provide feedback on this, I'd appreciate.

@Paulo I'd like to hear your opinion on possible issues of future backports,
if we backported this rename patch to SLES.


Cheers,

Enzo