Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/930173/

No data structures found in the Linux kernel — at least, in any version
that escaped from Linus Torvalds’s development machine — are older than the
buffer head. Like many other legacies from the early days of Linux, buffer
heads have been targeted for removal for years. They persist, though,
despite the problems they present. Now, Christoph Hellwig has posted a patch
series that enables the building of a kernel without buffer heads — but
the cost of doing so at this point will be more than most want to pay.