Re: Collapse ext2 and 3 please

Andrew Morton
2004-06-25T21:57:52Z

Sean Neakums <sneakums@zork.net> wrote:
>
> I seem to remember somebody, I think maybe Andrew Morton, suggesting
> that a no-journal mode be added to ext3 so that ext2 could be removed.
> I can't find the message in question right now, though.

I think it could be done, mainly as a kernel-space-saving exercise. But
the two filesystems are quite different nowadays.

ext2 uses per-inode pagecache for directories, ext3 uses blockdev
pagecache. The truncate algorithms are significantly different. Other stuff.

Much pain, little gain.