ext3-2.4-0.9.9

ext3-2.4-0.9.9

[Andrew Morton]

Patches against 2.4.10-pre4 and 2.4.9-ac9 are at

	http://www.uow.edu.au/~andrewm/linux/ext3/

It's a fairly large change.  The most significant parts are

* the inclusion of Stephen's error-handling work, which is designed to 
  remount the fs read-only in the presence of software and hardware
  errors, rather than forcing a panic.

* Stephen's fix for the journal_revoke assertion failure which
  three people have reported.

There have been two reports of a possible interaction problem with vfat
where a readdir on the vfat mountpoint returns ENOTDIR when ext3 is
present in the kernel.  This has proved elusive and in fact has
been observed on systems where ext3 was never used.  It is probably
a vfat bug.

At the above website there is also a patch from Ted Ts'o which will
provide significant speedups for accessing large directories.  Ted's
equivalent patch for ext2 has already been incorporated into the
official kernel(s).  If possible, please test Ted's patch on top
of ext3 0.9.9.

Detailed changelog:


0.9.7
-----

- Merge in a large batch of changes to allow ext3 to recover gracefully
  from fatal errors.  If the fs is set to remount-readonly on error, then
  we should still be able to unwind cleanly and unmount the filesystem.

- Performance: don't write superblocks synchronously.  This reduces a
  bottleneck in the VM.

  Load the ext3 module with the parameter "do_sync_supers=1" to restore
  the previous behaviour.

- Performance: don't force a new transaction every time we sync (should
  prevent the writes previously happening every 5 seconds, allowing laptop
  drives to spin down again.)

0.9.8
-----

- Fix an NFS oops when doing a local delete on an active, nfs-exported
  file.

- Add proper log levels to a lot of kernel warnings when mounting a bad
  filesystem or a fs with errors

- Make sure we set the error flag both in the journal and fs superblocks
  on error (unless we're doing panic-on-error)

0.9.9
-----

- Fix the buffer-already-revoked assertion failure by looking up an
  aliased buffercache buffer and clearing the revoke bits in there as
  well as in the journalled data buffer.

- Reorganise page truncation code so we don't take the address of
  block_flushpage().  This is to simplify merging with Andrea's
  O_DIRECT patch, which turns block_flushpage() into a macro.


-

Re: ext3-2.4-0.9.9

[Robert Love]

For reference, I am using 2.4.9-ac9 + ext3-0.9.9 + dir_speedup +
kpreempt with no problem.  I have my root mounted as ext3, type ordered,
with a local journal.

I don't have any data points on performance gains, but I would be happy
to provide any if you specify what.  Everything feels good.

I see no reason not to merge this into Alan's tree.  At least
ext3-0.9.9, but the directory speedup seems reasonable enough too.

-- 
Robert M. Love
rml at ufl.edu
rml at tech9.net

Re: ext3-2.4-0.9.9

[Andrew Morton]

Robert Love wrote:
> 
> For reference, I am using 2.4.9-ac9 + ext3-0.9.9 + dir_speedup +
> kpreempt with no problem.  I have my root mounted as ext3, type ordered,
> with a local journal.
> 
> I don't have any data points on performance gains, but I would be happy
> to provide any if you specify what.  Everything feels good.

OK, thanks.

> I see no reason not to merge this into Alan's tree.  At least
> ext3-0.9.9, but the directory speedup seems reasonable enough too.

Well, it's a fairly large diff, so it's best to not force it onto
people until volunteer testers have had a week or so to try it out.

-

Re: ext3-2.4-0.9.9

[Matthias Andree]

On Fri, 07 Sep 2001, Andrew Morton wrote:

> Patches against 2.4.10-pre4 and 2.4.9-ac9 are at

One issue about 0.9.6, 0.9.9 shows no relevant changes: can I mount my
root partition with data=journal without setting up an initrd?

Re: ext3-2.4-0.9.9

[Robert Love]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 283 bytes --]

I went ahead and rediffed ext3-0.9.9 against 2.4.9-ac10.  Find it
attached (65k, 17k gzipped).

Ted's ext3 directory speedup still applies cleanly, of course.

Still using ext3-0.9.9 + dir speed up, now on ac10, with no problems.

-- 
Robert M. Love
rml at ufl.edu
rml at tech9.net


[-- Attachment #2: patch-rml-2.4.9-ac10-ext3-0.9.9-1.gz --]
[-- Type: application/x-gzip, Size: 17906 bytes --]

Re: ext3-2.4-0.9.9

[Mike Fedyk]

On Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 12:03:24AM -0400, Robert Love wrote:
> I went ahead and rediffed ext3-0.9.9 against 2.4.9-ac10.  Find it
> attached (65k, 17k gzipped).
> 
> Ted's ext3 directory speedup still applies cleanly, of course.
> 
> Still using ext3-0.9.9 + dir speed up, now on ac10, with no problems.
> 

Can someone point me to that dir speed up patch?  I've looked on kernel
newbies for Tso's page, google searches found old dev archives for ext2, and
a patch against 2.4.4 for directory indexing....

Is there anything I should know before trying this?

Mike

Re: ext3-2.4-0.9.9

[David Rees]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2001 at 06:39:49PM -0700, Mike Fedyk wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 12:03:24AM -0400, Robert Love wrote:
> > I went ahead and rediffed ext3-0.9.9 against 2.4.9-ac10.  Find it
> > attached (65k, 17k gzipped).
> > 
> > Ted's ext3 directory speedup still applies cleanly, of course.
> > 
> > Still using ext3-0.9.9 + dir speed up, now on ac10, with no problems.
> > 
> 
> Can someone point me to that dir speed up patch?  I've looked on kernel
> newbies for Tso's page, google searches found old dev archives for ext2, and
> a patch against 2.4.4 for directory indexing....
> 
> Is there anything I should know before trying this?

You can download it at the ext3 for 2.4 page:

http://www.uow.edu.au/~andrewm/linux/ext3/

Only thing you should know is that it hasn't been that heavily tested on
ext3.

-Dave

Re: ext3-2.4-0.9.9

[Tom Rini]

On Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 04:59:52AM +0200, Matthias Andree wrote:
> On Fri, 07 Sep 2001, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
> > Patches against 2.4.10-pre4 and 2.4.9-ac9 are at
> 
> One issue about 0.9.6, 0.9.9 shows no relevant changes: can I mount my
> root partition with data=journal without setting up an initrd?

If you pass rootflags=data=journal, yes.  I _think_ that's the flag.

-- 
Tom Rini (TR1265)
http://gate.crashing.org/~trini/