With the help of VMware's Dirk Hohndel (VMware's Chief Open Source
Officer, a VP position near the top of the organization, and a
personal friend of Linus), I have been fortunate enough to make
contact directly with Linus Torvalds to discuss this issue. In emails
to me he has told me that this patch is no longer provisional:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=fff75eb2a08c2ac96404a2d79685668f3cf5a7a3
Linus has given me permission to quote him, so here is a quote from an
email he sent 2019-01-17:
> That commit (b4678df184b3: "errseq: Always report a writeback error
> once") was already backported to the stable trees (4.14 and 4.16), so
> yes, everything should be fine. We did indeed miss old errors for a
> while.
>
> > The latest information I could find on this said this commit was "provisional" but
> > also that it might be back-patched to 4.13 and on. Can you clarify the status of
> > this patch in either respect?
>
> It was definitely backported to both 4.14 and 4.16, I see it in my
> email archives.
>
> The bug may remain in 4.13, but that isn't actually maintained any
> more, and I don't think any distro uses it (distros tend to use the
> long-term stable kernels that are maintained, or sometimes maintain
> their own patch queue).
I think that eliminates the need for this patch.
--
Kevin Grittner
VMware vCenter Server
https://www.vmware.com/