Apparently we can never deprecate mount options in this project, because
it will invariably turn out that some foolish userspace depends on some
behavior and break. From Oleksandr Natalenko:
In v6.18, the attr2 XFS mount option is removed. This may silently
break system boot if the attr2 option is still present in /etc/fstab
for rootfs.
Consider Arch Linux that is being set up from scratch with / being
formatted as XFS. The genfstab command that is used to generate
/etc/fstab produces something like this by default:
/dev/sda2 on / type xfs (rw,relatime,attr2,discard,inode64,logbufs=8,logbsize=32k,noquota)
Once the system is set up and rebooted, there's no deprecation warning
seen in the kernel log:
# cat /proc/cmdline
root=UUID=
77b42de2-397e-47ee-a1ef-
4dfd430e47e9 rootflags=discard rd.luks.options=discard quiet
# dmesg | grep -i xfs
[ 2.409818] SGI XFS with ACLs, security attributes, realtime, scrub, repair, quota, no debug enabled
[ 2.415341] XFS (sda2): Mounting V5 Filesystem
77b42de2-397e-47ee-a1ef-
4dfd430e47e9
[ 2.442546] XFS (sda2): Ending clean mount
Although as per the deprecation intention, it should be there.
Vlastimil (in Cc) suggests this is because xfs_fs_warn_deprecated()
doesn't produce any warning by design if the XFS FS is set to be
rootfs and gets remounted read-write during boot. This imposes two
problems:
1) a user doesn't see the deprecation warning; and
2) with v6.18 kernel, the read-write remount fails because of unknown
attr2 option rendering system unusable:
systemd[1]: Switching root.
systemd-remount-fs[225]: /usr/bin/mount for / exited with exit status 32.
# mount -o rw /
mount: /: fsconfig() failed: xfs: Unknown parameter 'attr2'.
Thorsten (in Cc) suggested reporting this as a user-visible regression.
From my PoV, although the deprecation is in place for 5 years already,
it may not be visible enough as the warning is not emitted for rootfs.
Considering the amount of systems set up with XFS on /, this may
impose a mass problem for users.
Vlastimil suggested making attr2 option a complete noop instead of
removing it.
IOWs, the initrd mounts the root fs with (I assume) no mount options,
and mount -a remounts with whatever options are in fstab. However,
XFS doesn't complain about deprecated mount options during a remount, so
technically speaking we were not warning all users in all combinations
that they were heading for a cliff.
Gotcha!!
Now, how did 'attr2' get slurped up on so many systems? The old code
would put that in /proc/mounts if the filesystem happened to be in attr2
mode, even if user hadn't mounted with any such option. IOWs, this is
because someone thought it would be a good idea to advertise system
state via /proc/mounts.
The easy way to fix this is to reintroduce the four mount options but
map them to a no-op option that ignores them, and hope that nobody's
depending on attr2 to appear in /proc/mounts. (Hint: use the fsgeometry
ioctl). But we've learned our lesson, so complain as LOUDLY as possible
about the deprecation.
Lessons learned:
1. Don't expose system state via /proc/mounts; the only strings that
ought to be there are options *explicitly* provided by the user.
2. Never tidy, it's not worth the stress and irritation.
Reported-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Reported-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # v6.18-rc1
Fixes: b9a176e54162f8 ("xfs: remove deprecated mount options")
Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Carlos Maiolino <cem@kernel.org>
* Table driven mount option parser.
*/
enum {
- Opt_logbufs, Opt_logbsize, Opt_logdev, Opt_rtdev,
+ Op_deprecated, Opt_logbufs, Opt_logbsize, Opt_logdev, Opt_rtdev,
Opt_wsync, Opt_noalign, Opt_swalloc, Opt_sunit, Opt_swidth, Opt_nouuid,
Opt_grpid, Opt_nogrpid, Opt_bsdgroups, Opt_sysvgroups,
Opt_allocsize, Opt_norecovery, Opt_inode64, Opt_inode32,
Opt_lifetime, Opt_nolifetime, Opt_max_atomic_write,
};
+#define fsparam_dead(NAME) \
+ __fsparam(NULL, (NAME), Op_deprecated, fs_param_deprecated, NULL)
+
static const struct fs_parameter_spec xfs_fs_parameters[] = {
+ /*
+ * These mount options were supposed to be deprecated in September 2025
+ * but the deprecation warning was buggy, so not all users were
+ * notified. The deprecation is now obnoxiously loud and postponed to
+ * September 2030.
+ */
+ fsparam_dead("attr2"),
+ fsparam_dead("noattr2"),
+ fsparam_dead("ikeep"),
+ fsparam_dead("noikeep"),
+
fsparam_u32("logbufs", Opt_logbufs),
fsparam_string("logbsize", Opt_logbsize),
fsparam_string("logdev", Opt_logdev),
return opt;
switch (opt) {
+ case Op_deprecated:
+ xfs_fs_warn_deprecated(fc, param);
+ return 0;
case Opt_logbufs:
parsing_mp->m_logbufs = result.uint_32;
return 0;
xfs_mount_set_dax_mode(parsing_mp, result.uint_32);
return 0;
#endif
- /* Following mount options will be removed in September 2025 */
case Opt_max_open_zones:
parsing_mp->m_max_open_zones = result.uint_32;
return 0;