From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Theodore Tso Subject: Re: howto downgrade ext4 to ext3 Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:58:51 -0400 Message-ID: <20090918175851.GH26991@mit.edu> References: <4AB39EC5.6070107@it-sudparis.eu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org To: jehan procaccia Return-path: Received: from THUNK.ORG ([69.25.196.29]:49708 "EHLO thunker.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1757590AbZIRR6x (ORCPT ); Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:58:53 -0400 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4AB39EC5.6070107@it-sudparis.eu> Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 04:52:53PM +0200, jehan procaccia wrote: > some of you might have followed my miseries about quota support and ext4 ... > http://marc.info/?l=linux-ext4&m=125320312905576&w=2 > > Apparently the only sure and secure solution offered to me is to > downgrade my ext4 FS to ext3 :-( . > now , is there a procedure to do that ? There isn't a procedure to do this, other than backup, reformat, and restore. Sorry about that; it's just one of those things we haven't had the resources to create --- and it would not be a trivial task. Looking at the problems you had, have you tried simply mounting your ext4 filesystem with -o nodelalloc? The RHEL5.4 kernel doesn't have various delalloc patches, and I can certainly understand why Red Hat might not be willing to try to engage in backporting all of the delalloc fixes to its kernel, but you might be able to use the -o nodelalloc feature to simply disable the ext4 feature which appears to be causing the problem. This will cause you to give up some performance, but not as much as dropping back to ext3. Regards, - Ted