Hey Linus, This is the batch of pull requests for the v6.17 merge window! I'm trying something new where I'm attaching a cover letter with a short summary of all the various pull requests flowing to you during this cycle. Lucky for me the v6.17 merge window coincides with me moving. IOW, I'm currently getting squashed by moving boxes and disassembled furniture. I'm just happy that I did find my laptop in this mess and I hope there's no notable effects due to the last couple of weeks. In any case, this cycle was pretty usual for us given the past years. We have two new system call additions in core vfs file_getattr() and file_setattr() which are exensible successors to the legacy ioctl()s. There's further work in the form of preparatory changes to the directory locking scheme we currently have; both on the vfs level and for overlayfs specificall. I want to stress that no actual locking changes have happened yet and that there's not yet any commitment by us to actually land any of this. We have a new bpf kfunc extension for reading extended attributes from cgroups. This is the first time we're routing bpf patches but I will do this for all future vfs bpf extensions so we know exactly how and when something is happening. There's another round of extensive coredump work. Not just an extension to the coredump socket but also a rework of the coredump code to just be more readable and maintainable. I'm somewhat afraid of what I've gotten myself into by touching that code but hey, that's part of the deal. We have some work at the intersection of the block and vfs layer in the form of the new FS_IOC_GETLBMD_CAP ioctl() which returns information about the files integrity profile for userspace applications that need to understand a files end-to-end data protection support and configure the I/O accordingly. Iomap has been quite active as well with some refactoring and changes to the infrastucture to extend the abilities of fuse and support large folios. Hell, if this keeps going on every filesystem will move to fuse and we'll all be out of a job soon. There's the usual pile of miscellaneous changes to the vfs layer and filesystems. No need to cover this in detail here. We also have some work at the intersection of mm and the vfs by porting a good chunk of filesystems from f_op->mmap() to the new and better f_op->mmap_prepare(). I'm going to haunt the relevant developers to finish this conversion asap because I have no appetite of running around with yet more duplicated methods than we already have. I mean, we've just gotten rid of f_op->readdir() last year or so - actually you did. I'm also routing the usual namespace work. This time in the form of some minor nsfs extensions by exposing a bunch of uapi symbols that a lot of userspace already relies on and so we can't change those constants anyway. That's the root inode number of procfs and the inode numbers of the initial set of namespaces. We've also been very active in pidfs which gains a bunch of new features such as persisent exit and coredump information, extended attributes, autonomous file handles, and pidfd for reaped task from SCM_PDIFD messages. A few minor Rust updates are also in there but they're really not that interesting at all. And at last a new struct super_operations method that allows multi-device filesystems such as btrfs to be informed when a block device is removed. Since btrfs can survive surprise device removal this complements the usual ->shutdown() call nicely. That's all! Expect some slight delay in responses as I'm going to be preoccupied with the move over the weekend. Thanks! Christian
