Message-ID: <da1b1926-ba18-4a81-93e0-56cb2f85e4dd@landley.net>
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2025 14:02:00 -0500
From: Rob Landley <rob@...dley.net>
To: Christian Brauner <brauner@...nel.org>, Lichen Liu <lichliu@...hat.com>
Cc: linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
 safinaskar@...omail.com, kexec@...ts.infradead.org, weilongchen@...wei.com,
 cyphar@...har.com, linux-api@...r.kernel.org, zohar@...ux.ibm.com,
 stefanb@...ux.ibm.com, initramfs@...r.kernel.org, corbet@....net,
 linux-doc@...r.kernel.org, viro@...iv.linux.org.uk, jack@...e.cz
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] fs: Add 'rootfsflags' to set rootfs mount options

On 8/21/25 03:24, Christian Brauner wrote:
> This seems rather useful but I've renamed "rootfsflags" to

I remember when bikeshedding came in the form of a question.

> "initramfs_options" because "rootfsflags" is ambiguous and it's not
> really just about flags.

The existing config option (applying to the fallback root=/dev/blah 
filesystem overmounting rootfs) is called "rootflags", the new name 
differs for the same reason init= and rdinit= differ.

The name "rootfs" has been around for over 20 years, as evidenced in 
https://kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.txt 
and so on. Over the past decade least three independently authored 
patches have come up with the same name for this option. Nobody ever 
suggested a name where people have to remember whether it has _ or - in it.

Technically initramfs is the name of the cpio extractor and related 
plumbing, the filesystem instance identifies itself as "rootfs" in
/proc/mounts:

$ head -n 1 /proc/mounts
rootfs / rootfs rw,size=29444k,nr_inodes=7361 0 0

I.E. rootfs is an instance of ramfs (or tmpfs) populated by initramfs.

Given that rdinit= is two letters added to init= it made sense for 
rootfsflags= to be two letters added to rootflags= to distinguish them.

(The "rd" was because it's legacy shared infrastructure with the old 
1990s initial ramdisk mechanism ala /dev/ram0. The same reason 
bootloaders like grub have an "initrd" command to load the external 
cpio.gz for initramfs when it's not statically linked into the kernel 
image: the delivery mechanism is the same, the kernel inspects the file 
type to determine how to handle it. This new option _isn't_ legacy, and 
"rootfs" is already common parlance, so it seemed obvious to everyone 
with even moderate domain familiarity what to call it.)

> Other than that I think it would make sense to just raise the limit to
> 90% for the root_fs_type mount. I'm not sure why this super privileged
> code would only be allowed 50% by default.

Because when a ram based filesystem pins all available memory the kernel 
deadlocks (ramfs always doing this was one of the motivations to use 
tmpfs, but tmpfs doesn't mean you have swap), because the existing use 
cases for this come from low memory systems that already micromanage 
this sort of thing so a different default wouldn't help, because it 
isn't a domain-specific decision but was inheriting the tmpfs default 
value so you'd need extra code _to_ specify a different default, because 
you didn't read the answer to the previous guy who asked this question 
earlier in this patch's discussion...

https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/8/8/1050

Rob

P.S. It's a pity lkml.iu.edu and spinics.net are both down right now, 
but after vger.kernel.org deleted all reference to them I can't say I'm 
surprised. Neither lkml.org nor lore.kernel.org have an obvious threaded 
interface allowing you to find stuff without a keyword search, and 
lore.kernel.org somehow manages not to list "linux-kernel" in its top 
level list of "inboxes" at all. The wagons are circled pretty tightly...

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