The developer Jan Kara from SUSE proposed a patch that removes code supporting the Xenix, SystemV/386, and Coherent file systems from the Linux kernel. This code has been marked as unsupported (orphaned) since 2023, and no one has come forward to maintain it since. Maintainer Christian Brauner, who is responsible for file systems in the kernel, agreed to the proposal and accepted the patch into the vfs-6.15 branch. A few hours ago, the contents of vfs-6.15 were moved to the linux-next branch, where preparations for changes for the upcoming 6.15 kernel are underway.
The story began in 2002 when the Linux kernel was freed from the global lock (BKL - Big Kernel Lock) in favor of more granular locks. At that time, the SystemV file system transitioned to rwlock, but this led to issues that prevented the processor from entering sleep mode during calls to the entire function reading inode metadata. The problem was only noticed in 2023 due to stress testing with the SyzBot tool. This incident shows that no one uses the SystemV FS, and it can be removed.
Forrás: opennet.ru
