Re: [Ext2-devel] [rfc] Near-constant time directory index for Ext2

tytso
2001-02-23T20:41:45Z

From: Daniel Phillips <phillips@innominate.de>
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 00:04:02 +0100

I resolve not to take a position on this subject, and I will carry
forward both a 'squeaky clean' backward-compatible version that sets an
INCOMPAT flag, and a 'slightly tarnished' but very clever version that
is both forward and backward-compatible, along the lines suggested by
Ted. Both flavors have the desireable property that old versions of
fsck with no knowledge of the new index structure can remove the indices
automatically, with fsck -y.

Note that in the long run, the fully comatible version should probably
have a COMPAT feature flag set so that you're forced to use a new enough
version of e2fsck. Otherwise an old e2fsck may end up not noticing
corruptions in an index block which might cause a new kernel to have
serious heartburn.

- Ted