On Tue, Mar 03, 2026 at 09:19:42AM -0500, Jeff Layton wrote:
There are really only three options here:
1/ Do (almost) all of the changes in one giant patch
2/ Accept that the build may break during the interim stages
3/ This series: using a typedef and macro to work around the breakage until the type can be changed, at the expense of some extra churn in the codebase
4/ Don't do anything, drop the patch series (I'm not in favour of this, but it is an option)
5/ Do the conversion(s) _once_ per filesystem. Here's one way to do it:
- unsigned long i_ino; + union { + u64 i_ino64; + struct { +#if defined(CONFIG_64BIT) + unsigned long i_ino; +#elif defined(CONFIG_CPU_BIG_ENDIAN) + unsigned long i_ino; + unsigned long i_ino_pad; +#else + unsigned long i_ino_pad; + unsigned long i_ino; +#endif + }; + };
[...] #define i_ino(inode) (inode)->i_ino64
So that's patch one. All plain references to i_ino access the lower bits of i_ino64, so everything will continue to work as it does today.
Once you've got the VFS core in shape, you can convert filesystems one at a time to use i_ino(inode). Once you're done you can delete the scaffolding from the core and go back to calling i_ino64 just i_ino. You could delete the i_ino() uses from filesystems at that point, but why bother?
I'm sure there are other ways to do it, this is just the one I came up with. But for the love of god stop spamming hundreds of people on the cc of this patchset. In fact, take me off for next time -- I get each one of these fucking patches four times.