The Great Fix-It Friday - When Reversing Course is Progress
Today we're diving into a fascinating day in the Linux kernel where sometimes the best fix is admitting you were wrong! Linus pulled in critical BPF fixes, KVM improvements, and Hyperv updates, but the real star is Andreas Gruenbacher's thoughtful revert of a GFS2 change - proving that good engineering sometimes means going backwards to go forward.
Duration: PT3M44S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Linux Kernel.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Linux Kernel
- Published: 2026-01-14T16:46:35Z
- Audio duration: PT3M44S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Hey there, kernel explorers! Welcome back to another episode of Linux Kernel - I'm your host, and wow, do we have a thoughtful set of changes to dig into today from January 14th, 2026.
You know what I love about today's activity? It's a perfect reminder that software development isn't always about charging forward with new features. Sometimes the most mature thing you can do is take a step back, reassess, and make the tough call to reverse course. And that's exactly what we're seeing today!
Let's start with our main event - a beautifully humble revert from Andreas Gruenbacher in the GFS2 filesystem. Now, this isn't your typical "oops, this broke everything" revert. This is something much more interesting. Andreas originally thought there was a bug in GFS2 because it was chaining bios in the opposite…
Well, here's the plot twist - it turns out that "backwards" bio chaining was completely intentional! The GFS2 team designed it that way so the first bio's callback gets invoked instead of the last one's. And there's a really elegant reason for this: when you have an initial bio that starts page-aligned and covers…
It's like conducting an orchestra - sometimes you need the first violin…
Now…
Nearby episodes from Linux Kernel
- Memory Management Deep Dive
- The Great Cleanup - When 18 Fixes Tell a Story
- Cleanup Day - When Maintenance Makes Everything Better
- Kernel Fix-a-Palooza
- Low-Level Architecture Overhaul
- Weekly Recap - Timer Infrastructure Modernization
- Late-Cycle Maintainer Transition and Hardware Fixes
- Memory Safety and Resource Management Fixes