Re: [Ext2-devel] [RFC 0/13] extents and 48bit ext3

Theodore Tso
2006-06-09T22:31:50Z

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