From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751403AbWFIWbu (ORCPT ); Fri, 9 Jun 2006 18:31:50 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932570AbWFIWbs (ORCPT ); Fri, 9 Jun 2006 18:31:48 -0400 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 Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2006 18:31:29 -0400 From: Theodore Tso 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 Subject: Re: [Ext2-devel] [RFC 0/13] extents and 48bit ext3 Message-ID: <20060609223129.GI10524@thunk.org> Mail-Followup-To: Theodore Tso , 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 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 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20060609220711.GA29684@ca-server1.us.oracle.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.11 X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: tytso@thunk.org X-SA-Exim-Scanned: No (on thunker.thunk.org); SAEximRunCond expanded to false Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@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