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

Diego Calleja
2006-06-09T19:09:12Z

El Fri, 9 Jun 2006 20:50:00 +0200,
Diego Calleja <diegocg@gmail.com> escribió:

> Not at all, a config option may be disabled by lots of distros
> and make backwards compatibility even more difficult than
> is already going to be.

(I meant: Distros could switch it off, and in a two years
timeframe for some reason you could try to read data from
a disk created by a kernel with that feature and it wont
work, meanwhile with the current approach you'll be able
to use a mount flag.)

In my very humble user opinion, the big difference between ext2/3
and ext3/4 is that ext2/3 really was supposed to be on-disk
compatible, except for the journal. However ext4, AIUI, is
supposed to be _really_ different.

The kernel that includes the 48bit patches will already be a sort
of "ext4" filesystem, since 2.6.17 and previous kernels are not
going to be able to read it. Moving the source to ext4 or keeping
it in ext3/ is just about mainteinance, not about making a new
filesystem or not - that will happen as soon as the patches are
merged.