mkreiserfs -s 1024 makes unmountable partitions

[Francois-Rene Rideau <fare@tunes.org>]

Hi! No hard disk crash today (I'm just disabling the DMA )-" )
However, I've tried to make small reiserfs partitions,
and was annoyed at the journal taking a significant size of the disk:
32MB is 50% of my 64MB /boot partition, and 40% of the whole
of my server's 80MB harddisk.

I saw that mkreiserfs had an option -s to select the size of the journal,
and tried to use it to make a 4MB journal:
	mkreiserfs -s 1024 /dev/hdc1
However, whereas mkreiserfs didn't complain, the resulting partition
was unmountable by linux. In the syslogs, the kernel complains:
read_super_block: can't find a reiserfs filesystem on (dev 16:01, block 128, size 512)
read_super_block: can't find a reiserfs filesystem on (dev 16:01, block 16, size 512)

I there a way to make a reiserfs partition with a small journal?
32MB is really a waste, on some partitions.
Would a small kernel patch do it?
In any case, I think that it is a bug that mkreiserfs doesn't check
the consistency of its parameters with what the kernel is able to handle.

PS: I'm using debian's reiserfsprogs 1:3.6.4-2 and linux kernel 2.4.20.

Cheers!

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
You can only find happiness by striving towards something else.