On Thu, May 20, 2021 at 05:55:34PM +0200, Cyril Brulebois wrote: > Paul Gevers <elb...@debian.org> (2021-05-20): > > On 20-05-2021 00:11, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > > > > Unfortunately, there was no release.debian.org bug to track this. Due > > to the current high volume to our list, this fell from the radar. To > > avoid this I now generate a pre-approval unblock request to discuss > > this, because than it shows up in our tools. Please follow up there. > > Yes, and I see a question was raised for the Installer team but > debian-boot@ wasn't cc'd, and we aren't psychic. :)
My apologies for not getting the process right by opening a pre-approval bug earlier! > > Can you elaborate where you see the *risks* of the patch? Is this > > patch backwards compatible? I.e. does it work correctly on data > > generated with the old e2fsprogs? If not, what must the user do to > > avoid issues? Should it be mentioned in the release notes? That patch is rather long, but it's all mostly of the form: - tail = (struct ext4_fc_tail *)ext4_fc_tag_val(tl); + memcpy(&tail, ext4_fc_tag_val(tl), sizeof(tail)); So the risks are very low. > > Apart from the failing test cases, I see in the patch description that > > there's also real use cases impacted (corner cases if I interpret them > > right). IIUC these are no regressions but I'd like to be sure. And > > what's the impact for users of those corner cases (especially the new > > Linux feature, I would expect that some users would be going to use > > those). Ext4 fast commits is a relatively new feature which is not enabled by mke2fs by default. It's a pretty cool feature in that in can result in some very impressive performance increases (75-130% improvements on some benchmarks), but there are still some rough edges. So in general it's not something that an "enterprise distro" would be supporting, although I imagine there will be some intrepid Debian Stable users who might want to try using it. The real world corner cases are if you are using a 32-bit arm binary on a 64-bit binary, and if you are using a sparc64 system (not an officially supported Debian arch). I'm not sure if misaligned pointer accesses are allowed in arm-32 kernel code, but it's definitely not supported on sparc64, so there is also a kernel-side patch which needed for those platforms that will be in 5.13 (landing upstream in 2-3 weeks). There are number of other minor bug fixes that I might want to include at the same time, but none of them are ones that I can honestly call "release-critical". Perhaps the one that I would want to pull in, and which is very low risk is: libext2fs: fix missing mutex unlock in an error path of the Unix I/O manager Originally from https://github.com/tytso/e2fsprogs/pull/68 Signed-off-by: Alexander Kanavin <alex.kana...@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Theodore Ts'o <ty...@mit.edu> Cheers, - Ted