Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/905931/

Filesystems maintain a lot of metadata about the files they hold; most of
this metadata is for consumption by user space. Some metadata, though,
stays buried within the filesystem and is not visible outside of the
kernel. Once such
piece of metadata is the file version count, known as i_version.
Current efforts to change how i_version is managed — and to make
it visible to user space — have engendered a debate on what
i_version actually means and what its behavior should be.