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

Linus Torvalds
2006-06-09T15:40:41Z

On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>
> Overall, I'm surprised that ext3 developers don't see any of the problems
> related to progressive, stealth filesystem upgrades.

Hey, they're used to it - they've been doing it for a long time.

In fact, ext3 wouldn't be ext3 unless I (and perhaps a few others) had
insisted on it. People wanted to try to upgrade ext2 in place.

And they've been upgrading it in-place for a long time.

Now, there are unquestionably advantages to that approach too, but as you
say, there are absolutely tons of disadvantages too. Bugs get much much
subtler, and more disastrous for old users that don't even want the new
features.

Quite frankly, at this point, there's no way in hell I believe we can do
major surgery on ext3. It's the main filesystem for a lot of users, and
it's just not worth the instability worries unless it's something very
obviously transparent.

I wouldn't mind an ext4 (that hopefully drops some of the features of
ext3, and might not downgrade to ext2 on errors, for example).

Linus