For anyone dealing with Minix file-systems still for this nearly 40 year old creation, the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel is expected to bring some fixes to the Minix driver for better handling corrupted file-system images.

Syzbot has uncovered some corruption bugs within the Linux kernel's Minix file-system driver. When trying to mount and deal with corrupted Minix file-systems, some problems were uncovered that are now being addressed to be able to report said corruption and fixing the underlying bugs detected.

It's now with Linux 6.19 that the Minix file-system driver is even seeing error handling for reporting inode corruption.:

"Add error handling to minix filesystem for inode corruption detection

We would like to provide early and specific warnings of filesystem corruption without running into generic WARN_ONs and BUG_ONs. Towards this goal, ext4, e.g., has a EFSCORRUPTED errno and a standardized inode corruption message format. This patch adds this errno and message format to the minix filesystem."

Those interested in all the technical details can find the queued Minix file-system driver patches via VFS.git's [1]vfs-6.19.minix Git branch with these fixes and error handling for this next version of the Linux kernel.



[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/vfs/vfs.git/log/?h=vfs-6.19.minix