Re: [GIT PULL] Ext3 removal, quota & udf fixes

From: Austin S Hemmelgarn
Date: Wed Sep 02 2015 - 09:34:26 EST


On 2015-09-02 07:58, Chuck Ebbert wrote:
On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 15:39:45 -0400
Austin S Hemmelgarn <ahferroin7@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2015-09-01 06:29, Albino B Neto wrote:
2015-08-31 19:31 GMT-03:00 Raymond Jennings <shentino@xxxxxxxxx>:
I think also that we should remove the ext2 driver before we remove the ext3
driver.

Yes. It is logical to remove the old ext2 drive, because there are
more computers with ext3 that ext2. Ext2 is obsolete by existing
technologies.

NO, it is not logical. A vast majority of Android smartphones in the
wild use ext2, as do a very significant portion of embedded systems that
don't have room for the few hundred kilobytes of extra code that the
ext4 driver has in comparison to ext2.

Would it be possible to discard the code used for ext4 and ext3
features at module init time? So you could do something like:

modprobe ext4 no_ext4 no_ext3

and all the space used by those functions would be freed and the
filesystem driver would mark all the ext3/ext4 features as
unsupported.

Personally, I think this is a great idea. It would allow people who need the low memory usage to transition over to the ext4 driver while keeping the memory usage low. In such a case, I would almost suggest making an alias for the ext4 module (extfs maybe?) as modprobe ext4 no_ext4 has the potential to significantly confuse people.

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