From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Theodore Tso Subject: Re: [Ext2-devel] [RFC 0/13] extents and 48bit ext3 Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2006 18:31:29 -0400 Message-ID: <20060609223129.GI10524@thunk.org> References: <4489A7ED.8070007@garzik.org> <20060609195750.GD10524@thunk.org> <20060609203803.GF3574@ca-server1.us.oracle.com> <20060609210319.GF10524@thunk.org> <20060609212410.GJ3574@ca-server1.us.oracle.com> <20060609215137.GG10524@thunk.org> <20060609220711.GA29684@ca-server1.us.oracle.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Received: from thunk.org ([69.25.196.29]:45530 "EHLO thunker.thunk.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751403AbWFIWbr (ORCPT ); Fri, 9 Jun 2006 18:31:47 -0400 To: Jeff Garzik , Alex Tomas , Andrew Morton , ext2-devel , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Linus Torvalds , cmm@us.ibm.com, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, Andreas Dilger Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20060609220711.GA29684@ca-server1.us.oracle.com> Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 03:07:11PM -0700, Joel Becker wrote: > Excellent. And now let's close the other side of compatibility. > The attribute problem we discussed with e2fsck has a simple solution: > exit cleanly when you don't understand a filesystem. > If e2fsck finds an INCOMPAT flag it doesn't understand, it > didn't *fail* to fsck, it just plain doesn't understand the filesystem. > This should not, in any way, prevent bootup from continuing. Later, > mount may succeed (if the kernel is new enough) or fail (if not), but my > system won't be completely unusable by surprise (assuming that / isn't > the affected filesystem). The potential problem with this is that system administrator may never realize that the filesystem is just getting silently skipped. (And a big fat warning printed by e2fsck doesn't help when distro's like Ubuntu use a graphical boot sequence that hides warning messages printed by e2fsck). Is it really that hard to edit /etc/fstab so that the fsck pass is skipped? I might be willing to make it be a configurable option in /etc/e2fsck.conf, but it *is* dangerous to have e2fsck exit with success without having actually checked the filesystem. - Ted