Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/931809/

The buffer head is a kernel data structure that dates back to the first
Linux release; for much of the time since then, kernel developers have been
hoping to get rid of it. Hannes Reinecke
started a plenary session at the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management
and BPF Summit by saying that everybody agrees that buffer heads are a
bad idea, but there is less agreement on how to take them out of the
kernel. The core functionality they provide — facilitating sector-size I/O
operations to a block device underlying a filesystem — must be provided
somehow.