Re: [PATCH] ext4: remove obsolete EXT3 config options

[Guenter Roeck]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2025 at 11:08:08AM +0200, Lukas Bulwahn wrote:
> From: Lukas Bulwahn <lukas.bulwahn@xxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> In June 2015, commit c290ea01abb7 ("fs: Remove ext3 filesystem driver")
> removed the historic ext3 filesystem support as ext3 partitions are fully
> supported with the ext4 filesystem support. To simplify updating the kernel
> build configuration, which had only EXT3 support but not EXT4 support
> enabled, the three config options EXT3_{FS,FS_POSIX_ACL,FS_SECURITY} were
> kept, instead of immediately removing them. The three options just enable
> the corresponding EXT4 counterparts when configs from older kernel versions
> are used to build on later kernel versions. This ensures that the kernels
> from those kernel build configurations would then continue to have EXT4
> enabled for supporting booting from ext3 and ext4 file systems, to avoid
> potential unexpected surprises.
> 
> Given that the kernel build configuration has no backwards-compatibility
> guarantee and this transition phase for such build configurations has been
> in place for a decade, we can reasonably expect all such users to have
> transitioned to use the EXT4 config options in their config files at this
> point in time. With that in mind, the three EXT3 config options are
> obsolete by now.
> 
> Remove the obsolete EXT3 config options.
> 

It would have been even better if all references in the kernel were updated
as well, avoiding all the resulting boot failures when trying to boot "defconfig"
images.

$ git describe
v6.18-rc1
$ git grep CONFIG_EXT3_FS | wc
    173     201    9817

Guenter