Re: Linux 6.2-rc1

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Thu, Jan 5, 2023 at 11:40 AM Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> wrote:
>
> Or even implement it in UDF itself somehow. But yes, ideally we'd punt all
> of this data gathering to userspace and just leave the trivial init/stop
> atapi/scsi commands to cdrom/sr.

I wonder how much of that could be done by just having a different
elevator algorithm for cdrw devices..

Anyway, realistically I suspect the real answer is that "nobody cares
enough any more". I suspect most people haven't used RW optical media
in over a decade, and we're talking about an increasingly dwindling
niche use.

Optical media may still make sense for backup, but probably not the
"filesystem" kind.

So nobody is going to be motivated to do any development in this area,
and the best we can do is probably to just keep it limping along.

Now, it's a bit sad how pktcdvd is the only user of that 'struct
block_device_operations' devnode thing, and I liked how that went away
after the removal of this driver.

And I'm not sure why pktcdvd needs it, everybody else seems to be
happy with gendisk->disk_name.

There's probably other cruft in pktcdvd that could be removed without
removing the whole driver, but I do get the feeling that it's just
less pain to keep the status quo, and that there isn't really much
motivation for anybody to do anything else.

                   Linus