Arnd Bergmann noted that he's working on removing the BKL from the Linux kernel, "I've spent some time continuing the work of the people on Cc and many others to remove the big kernel lock from Linux and I now have [a] bkl-removal branch in my git tree". He went on to explain that his branch is working, and lets him run the Linux kernel, "on [a] quad-core machine with the only users of the BKL being mostly obscure device driver modules." Arnd noted that this effort has a long history, "the oldest patch in this series is roughly eight years old and is Willy's patch to remove the BKL from fs/locks.c, and I took a series of patches from Jan that removes it from most of the VFS."

Arnd noted that his patch adds a global mutex to the TTY layer, which he called the 'Big TTY Mutex' and described as, "the basic idea here is to make recursive locking and the release-on-sleep explicit, so every mutex_lock, wait_event, workqueue_flush and schedule in the TTY layer now explicitly releases the BTM before blocking." Alan Cox suggested that this portion of the patch was best dropped for now, "it would be nice to get the other bits in first removing BKL from most of the kernel and building kernels which are non BKL except for the tty layer. That (after Ingo's box from hell has run it a bit) would reasonably test the assertion that the tty layer has no BKL requirements that are driven by [code] external to tty layer code." Andrew Morton suggested that the patches be pushed upstream to their appropriate maintainers for an additional sanity check, "Seems that there might be a few tricksy bits in here. Please do push at least the non-obvious parts out to the relevant people."

In a series of seven patches, Arnd Bergmann proposed adding in-memory write support to mounted cramfs file systems. He explained, "the intention is to use it for instance on read-only root file systems like CD-ROM, or on compressed initrd images. In either case, no data is written back to the medium, but remains in the page/inode/dentry cache, like ramfs does." Reactions were mixed. When Arnd suggested this as an alternative to using the more complex unionfs to overlay a temporary filesystem over a read-only file system, and that similar support could be added to other file systems, it was pointed out that there was ultimately more gained by focusing on a single solution that worked with all filesystems. David Newall stressed, "multiple implementations is a recipe for bugs and feature mismatch." Erez Zadok suggested, "I favor a more generic approach, one that will work with the vast majority of file systems that people use w/ unioning, preferably all of them." He went on to add that more gains would be had from modifying the union destination filesystem rather than multiple source filesystems. Arnd agreed in principle, but noted it would add complexity. He indicated that he'd explore the idea further, then explained:

"My idea was to have it in cramfs, squashfs and iso9660 at most, I agree that doing it in even a single writable file system would add far too much complexity. I did not mean to start a fundamental discussion about how to do it the right way, just noticed that there are half a dozen implementations that have been around for years without getting close to inclusion in the mainline kernel, while a much simpler approach gives you sane semantics for a subset of users."