XFS in Fedora Core 2

[Dave Jones]

On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 16:37, Xose Vazquez Perez wrote:

> Also note that RedHat propagates our bugfixes to its flavor of the kernel
> only when it syncs with the official kernel, which is not often. RedHat
> simply refuses to take bugfixes even if we send them.

I can't comment on this as I've only been @redhat for 6 months, and I've
not seen any communication from the reiser folks at all in this time,
so this is entirely based on water under the bridge as far as I'm
concerned.

The new approach that Fedora takes vs Red Hat Linux in trying to stick
as close to mainline as possible, and track it a lot more aggressively
than we did before means that we should pick up anything merged upstream
very quickly. The problem isn't so much the picking up of fixes however,
its the investigation that leads to those fixes.

If the first thing that $fs_vendor does is say "Can you repeat this on
a stock 2.4.23 kernel? No? Then its Red Hat's problem" thats not going
to help us get these filesystems out of unsupported. There _will_ be
bugs that only show up in the Fedora kernel that affect mainline as
well, but will show up quicker under Fedora kernel, and vice versa.

I'm hoping that we can get a lot more cooperation with various external
projects (not just filesystems), and get their input on the Fedora
kernel too.  A great example of this working out is the NTFS project.
They manage to get modules out for the Fedora kernel very quickly after
the release of an errata kernel. Whilst we're not going to ship NTFS in
the foreseeable future, we're not making their life more difficult than
it already is, and they take care of any NTFS related bugs themselves.

> Oh well, at least we shamed RedHat into not turning on the reiserfs debug
> option in their kernel so that users will think we are slow anymore.

Erk, I actually left that on in the FC1 kernel. I'll fix that for an
errata. I'll leave it on for the time being in FC2 kernel.
The plan was to have all the debugging checks on for the beta's to shake
out any bugs, and then switch them off for the final beta.
That got overlooked, it certainly wasn't intentional.

> I wish they would understand that this isn't what open source
> is supposed to be about, they are a good company in so many other ways, ah
> well, real human beings with egos on the line and all that. I still keep
> trying to convince them that we should all just get along and kill off
> Microsoft....;-)

Personally, I've found the namesys guys very easy to work with upstream,
hopefully that will continue for the Fedora kernels.

	Dave