=== quote from ext4 mailing list === The right way to do this is to take a look at the file system features. In the superblock: __u32 s_feature_compat; /* compatible feature set */ __u32 s_feature_incompat; /* incompatible feature set */ __u32 s_feature_ro_compat; /* readonly-compatible feature set */ If your software doesn't understand a file system feature which is in the incompatible feature set, it must not try to do anything with the file system. If your software is only going to read from the file system (for example, in the case of a boot loader, or if the file system is going to be mounted read-only), then it can ignore the s_feature_ro_compat bitmask. If your software is intending to modify the file system and there is a filesystem feature bit set that it doesn't know about, it MUST NOT try to modify the file system. It's important to check the file system feature bitmasks, since over time, we've added new features to ext2, ext3, and ext4. It's more accurate to consider ext2, ext3, and ext4 to be different implementations of the same abstract file system, with the ext4 file system driver being the most fully featureful implementation. When people talk about a "ext4 file system", that's basically a shorthand for saying that it's an ext2/3/4 file system which has features enabled which the traditional ext2 and ext3 drivers in more recent kernels do not support. But it's not a very precise statement. If someone asks me to debug "an ext4 file system", I will tell them that it's critically important that the send me the output of "dumpe2fs -h" so I can see what file system features were enabled for that particular file system. Similarly, when an enterprise distribution states that they support "ext4 file systems", there may be some newer ext4 file system features (such as bigalloc, inline_data, metadata_csum) which they do not support, even if the enterprise kernel supports said feature. Generally, in these cases the distribution will ship an /etc/mke2fs.conf file that only enables the file system features that they support when the user runs the "mke2fs -t ext4" command. I hope this helps, - Ted ================= Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org