Next btrfs development cycle open - 4.21

From: David Sterba <[email protected]>

Hi,

a friendly reminder of the timetable and what's expected at this phase.

4.19 - current
4.20 - upcoming, urgent regression fixes only
4.21 - development closed, pull request in prep, fixes or regressions only 4.22 - development open, until 4.21-rc5 (at least)

(https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Developer%27s_FAQ#Development_schedule)

Current status
--------------

The pull request for 4.21 will be sent on Wednesday 2018-12-19 because of the end of year holiday timing and merge window start. This is a hard freeze for patches that are not in for-next, small updates are pending.

My plan is to pull the 'enospc fixes' branch from Josef, as there are no significant code changes planned. If this does not work, the fixes will go as -rc updates.

The base of the pull request branch is misc-next, not yet forked as misc-4.21.

Hilights of 4.20 changes
------------------------

The more detailed description will be in the pull request, brief summary:

* swapfile support

* faster UUID change (incompatible change), does not need to rewrite all metadata blocks, only stores the new one in the superblock

* balance prints the filter options to system log

* slightly faster filesystem balance, skips initial phase that tried to make some space by shrink/grow

Git development repos
---------------------

k.org: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/kdave/linux.git
devel1: https://gitlab.com/kdave/btrfs-devel
devel2: https://github.com/kdave/btrfs-devel

Note: git repository at repo.or.cz is discouraged from use

The devel repos should be identical regarding the main development branches like misc-next or for-next-YYYYMMDD.