Linux EFS File-System May Have New Maintainer – Or It Might Just Get Removed

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An interesting quandary has arose on the Linux kernel mailing list over maintainership of old, unmaintained code within the Linux kernel. Someone has stepped up to maintain an old, very rare file-system driver but admittedly doesn’t even use it and just submitted basic fixes. Or is it just better removing that old code?

The interesting Linux kernel mailing list discussion is over the EFS file-system driver. No, not to be confused with Amazon’s Elastic File-System (EFS) but the Linux fs/efs driver is a read-only driver for file-systems used on non-ISO9660 CD-ROMs and hard disk partitions by SGI’s IRIX operating system. EFS was used by SGI IRIX in the pre-6.0 era before switching over to XFS.

Silicon Graphics had developed the Extent File-System “EFS” as an early block-device file-system. EFS was only used up to the mid-1990s before being replaced by the superior XFS.

After writing a patch to fix an undefined variable with newer versions of the GCC compiler, an open-source contributor inquired about taking over maintainership of this file-system driver in the mainline kernel. But beyond the limited experience working on this driver, the developer acknowledged he doesn’t personally have any actual EFS file-systems.

In the ensuing discussion, it was pointed out the utilities for making EFS file-systems don’t even work on modern Linux systems.

In the LKML discussion so far, more upstream stakeholders appear interested in just removing the unmaintained file-system from the upstream tree. Anyone still finding use out of EFS or to recover older data could always use an older/LTS kernel. So we’ll see what happens to EFS in Linux.

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