With the help of VMware's Dirk Hohndel (VMware's Chief Open Source Officer, a VP position near the top of the organization, and a personal friend of Linus), I have been fortunate enough to make contact directly with Linus Torvalds to discuss this issue. In emails to me he has told me that this patch is no longer provisional:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=fff75eb2a08c2ac96404a2d79685668f3cf5a7a3 Linus has given me permission to quote him, so here is a quote from an email he sent 2019-01-17: > That commit (b4678df184b3: "errseq: Always report a writeback error > once") was already backported to the stable trees (4.14 and 4.16), so > yes, everything should be fine. We did indeed miss old errors for a > while. > > > The latest information I could find on this said this commit was > > "provisional" but > > also that it might be back-patched to 4.13 and on. Can you clarify the > > status of > > this patch in either respect? > > It was definitely backported to both 4.14 and 4.16, I see it in my > email archives. > > The bug may remain in 4.13, but that isn't actually maintained any > more, and I don't think any distro uses it (distros tend to use the > long-term stable kernels that are maintained, or sometimes maintain > their own patch queue). I think that eliminates the need for this patch. -- Kevin Grittner VMware vCenter Server https://www.vmware.com/
