LP# 440522: FSCACHE modules not compiled in

[Tim Gardner]

On 03/08/2010 02:44 PM, Christian Kujau wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Lucid LTS is probably almost ready and maybe gone to feature-freeze
> already and I worry about a pet-peeve of mine, #LP 440522. The bugreport
> is reassigned between teams, even changed to WONTFIX some time ago but
> there's no consensus in sight. The summary so far:
>
>   1) CONFIG_FSCACHE is already enabled in Karmic, but for this to work
>      (and the "cachefilesd" package to be usable at all), the according
>      NFS_FSCACHE resp. AFS_FSCACHE have to be enabled.
>
>   2) There was an argument that Ubuntu typically doesn't enable
>      EXPERIMENTAL modules - this has been resolved, AFAICT.
>
> What's missing here? Should I generate a patch against the "linux"
> package in Ubuntu? (That would qualify as an non-maintainer-upload, if
> something like this exists in Ubuntu). I don't think enabling these
> modules will be a real burden for the Ubuntu team, as bugs will have to be
> addressed upstream as well. Also, it seems only logical to me to enable
> the *FS_FSCACHE modules, otherwise the already enabled FSCACHE option
> would be useless (as it is now).
>
> Thank you for your comments,
> Christian.

The issue with NFS_FSCACHE in particular is that upstream support 
appears to be lukewarm, e.g., neither fscache.c or fscache-index.c has 
been touched since April 2009, yet the feature is still marked 
EXPERIMENTAL. Furthermore, NFS_FSCACHE cannot be built as a module, 
i.e., enabling this feature is going to affect the base NFS 
implementation. Until this situation changes, I'm not going into a long 
term release with an experimental feature in the mainline NFS path.

rtg
-- 
Tim Gardner tim.gardner at canonical.com