Re: [Ext2-devel] [RFC 0/13] extents and 48bit ext3

From: Chase Venters
Date: Fri Jun 09 2006 - 12:24:21 EST


On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, Jeff Garzik wrote:

Alex Tomas wrote:
> > > > > Linus Torvalds (LT) writes:


LT> Quite frankly, at this point, there's no way in hell I believe we can LT> do major surgery on ext3. It's the main filesystem for a lot of users, LT> and it's just not worth the instability worries unless it's something LT> very obviously transparent.

I believe it's as stable as before until you mount with extents
mount option.

If it will remain a mount option, if it is never made the default (either in kernel or distro level), then only 1% of users will ever use the feature. And we shouldn't merge a 1% use feature into the _main_ filesystem for Linux.

Pardon me because I haven't made it all the way through this discussion yet, so I don't know if this has been suggested or dismissed. But I'm curious - rather than 'stealth upgrade' by way of mount options, why not just enable the functionality either via tune2fs or mkfs.ext3?

New distribution versions could ship installers that enable it, because users aren't really going to switch from a new distribution they just install to an older version (same story on the kernel).

Users that want the functionality today can have it by asking for it with tune2fs, they just have to bypass the warning that tells them they're not going to be able to boot kernels before 2.6.xx

Jeff

Cheers,
Chase
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