Linux EFS File-System May Have New Maintainer - Or It Might Just Get Removed - Phoronix
Articles & Reviews
News Archive
Forums
Premium Ad-Free<br>Contact
Popular Categories
Close
Articles & Reviews
News Archive
Forums
Premium
Contact
Categories
Computers Display Drivers Graphics Cards Linux Gaming Memory Motherboards Processors Software Storage Operating Systems Peripherals
Linux EFS File-System May Have New Maintainer - Or It Might Just Get Removed
Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 8 June 2026 at 07:00 AM EDT. 12 Comments
An interesting quandary has arose on the Linux kernel mailing list over maintainership of old, unmaintained code within the Linux kernel. Someone has stepped up to maintain an old, very rare file-system driver but admittedly doesn't even use it and just submitted basic fixes. Or is it just better removing that old code?
The interesting Linux kernel mailing list discussion is over the EFS file-system driver. No, not to be confused with Amazon's Elastic File-System (EFS) but the Linux fs/efs driver is a read-only driver for file-systems used on non-ISO9660 CD-ROMs and hard disk partitions by SGI's IRIX operating system. EFS was used by SGI IRIX in the pre-6.0 era before switching over to XFS.
Silicon Graphics had developed the Extent File-System "EFS" as an early block-device file-system. EFS was only used up to the mid-1990s before being replaced by the superior XFS.
After writing a patch to fix an undefined variable with newer versions of the GCC compiler, an open-source contributor inquired about taking over maintainership of this file-system driver in the mainline kernel. But beyond the limited experience working on this driver, the developer acknowledged he doesn't personally have any actual EFS file-systems.
In the ensuing discussion, it was pointed out the utilities for making EFS file-systems don't even work on modern Linux systems.
In the LKML discussion so far, more upstream stakeholders appear interested in just removing the unmaintained file-system from the upstream tree. Anyone still finding use out of EFS or to recover older data could always use an older/LTS kernel. So we'll see what happens to EFS in Linux.
12 Comments
Tweet
Btrfs Change Coming For Linux 7.2 Yields Very Healthy Performance Gain<br>Btrfs Preps Huge Folios Support Ahead Of Linux 7.2<br>Linux 7.2 Expected To Introduce "OPENAT2_REGULAR" To Avoid Tricking Secure Programs<br>OpenZFS 2.4.2 Released With Linux 7.0 Kernel Support, Many Bug Fixes<br>F2FS Preparing FSERROR Reporting Support<br>Axboe Hacking On New Linux Patches For 60% Increase To Per-Core I/O Performance
Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.
Firefox Merges Support For Vulkan Video Decoding<br>The Linux Kernel Ready To Make TSC A Hard Requirement For x86 CPUs<br>COSMIC Desktop's Frosted Glass Is Giving Windows Aero Vibes<br>Microsoft Announces Open-Source "Intelligent Terminal"<br>KDE Linux Prunes Its Insecure & Unused Software<br>Linux Might Finally Disable The Microsoft RNDIS Protocol Drivers In 2026<br>KDE Plasma 6.8 Still Planning To End X11 Support, 95% Of Plasma 6.6 Users Are On Wayland<br>Linux 7.2 Proceeding To Deprecate AF_ALG Due To "Massive Attack Surface", Drops Offloading
Running CachyOS With The BORE Scheduler While Disabling Ananicy-CPP
Xfce Ported To Rust-Written Redox OS For Better X11 Experience
Canonical Experimenting With x86-64-v3 Packages For Ubuntu 26.10
Linux 7.2 To Add ACPI CPPC v4 Support Authored By NVIDIA
Flatpak 1.18 Released With Integration For AMD ROCm
Linux EFS File-System May Have New Maintainer - Or It Might Just Get Removed
Vintage AMD R600 Graphics Driver Sees Code Cleanups Thanks To GitHub Copilot
Last Call For The Phoronix 22nd Birthday Premium Special
Linux 7.1-rc7 Released: Stable Hopefully Next Sunday
Firefox Merges Support For Vulkan Video Decoding
Wayland Protocols 1.49 Released With Improved Multi-GPU Support, Windows BT.2100
"Flatten The Pick" Linux Patches Progress For Better cgroup Scheduling While Linux Gaming
Mesa 26.2 Lands VK_GOOGLE_display_timing Support For Direct Display Mode
Phoronix Premium allows ad-free access to the site, multi-page articles on a single page, and other features while supporting this site's continued operations.
Linux 7.1 Helping Intel Arc Battlemage Graphics Achieve Better Performance
ARM Linux Server Performance Up More Than 7x Geo Mean In 8 Years, As Much As 15x With NVIDIA Vera CPU
Benchmarking The BORE Scheduler Performance With CachyOS Linux
AMD EPYC 8635P "Sorano" Benchmarks: Significant Upgrade...