On Thursday 07 April 2011 08:57:12 pm Jan Kara wrote:
Hello,
we are figuring out upstream how to eventually get rid of maintaing three code bases of ext2, ext3, and ext4 in parallel. These days ext4 kernel driver is able to handle both ext2 and ext3 filesystems in a backward compatible manner - i.e., you can mount, access, modify the filesystem with ext4 driver and then still be able to use it with the old ext2 driver. So I'd think that we could try changing config of our kernel in Factory so that ext4 driver is used for ext2 filesystem and see whether something breaks or not.
Do people have any opinion on this?
Wouldn't it be a safest path to replace the use cases of ext2 with ext_3_? It's way more mature than ext4, and presumably people have already been using ext3 to mount ext2 partitions for years. There's a problem with ext3 replacing ext2 as ext3 adds journaling which adds visible performance overhead. I suppose people who had not migrated from ext2 to ext3 by now either care about the performance difference or just don't care about anything all :). In both cases ext4 should be OK with
As you didn't mention a plan to drop the ext3 driver, I'd use it for ext2. IMHO it only makes sense to use the ext4 driver for ext2 partitions if we plan to drop the ext2 _and_ ext3 drivers, and use the ext4 driver for all three partition types. Well, there are plans for dropping ext3 as well. I just want to do it step by step. And ext3 is used by *much* more users than ext2 these days so
Hi Jean,
On Fri 08-04-11 19:36:56, Jean Delvare wrote:
them. I agree that ext3 is more mature than ext4 but by now ext4 is pretty
stable as well so I wouldn't be afraid to offer it to openSUSE users as a
replacement. In fact, ext2 codebase bitrots slowly because noone really
cares about it so migrating to ext4 is not that bad idea from stability POV
either.
that's why I want to be extra careful there...
Honza
--
Jan Kara