call for brave ext4 testers in F9, with caveats
Tom London
selinux at gmail.com
Sat Feb 9 21:08:26 UTC 2008
On Mon, Feb 4, 2008 at 9:23 AM, Eric Sandeen <sandeen at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi Gang -
>
> The ext4 filesystem is a feature slated for F9, and we (rh, ibm, bull,
> clusterfs, and others) are working feverishly to get it ready for a
> prime-time F9 fs option.
>
> I'd like to get a bit more exposure if possible, so if you're feeling
> like living on the cutting edge of filesystems, read on:
>
> Rawhide and the F9 alpha can install onto an ext4dev filesystem root;
> first you need to tell (a.k.a. lie to) the installer with
> "iamanext4developer" on the boot commandline. This is akin to the "jfs"
> or "reiserfs" options for those filesystems, but a higher hurdle (more
> characters to type!).
>
> Then you can do custom partitioning, and select ext4dev for any
> filesystem (except /boot - no grub support (yet)).
>
> The install should proceed Just Fine(tm). If not, let me know.
>
> And now for the (known) caveats:
>
> 1) Due to bug 429857: Root inode of ext4dev root filesystem does not get
> selinux label - booting with selinux enabled & enforcing will probably
> fail. Boot with enforcing=0, and use restorecon or chcon on / to
> (hopefully) properly update the root inode's selinux attrs. I have a
> fix for this bug, so soon, kernel updates will resolve this and allow it
> to be properly set (and retained). Please do test w/ selinux enabled
> though, as the new larger inodes and in-inode xattrs could use airtime.
>
> 2) There is no readily-available e2fsprogs which can repair your shiny
> new ext4dev filesystem. If something goes badly I'll help out because
> we need to know what went wrong, but so far there is no released
> upstream e2fsprogs which can handle the new ext4 features. So please
> consider anything you put on ext4dev for now to be disposable, just to
> be on the safe side. extents-capable e2fsprogs should be available Real
> Soon Now.
>
> 3) misc stuff - I've not yet tested ext4 over an encrypted block device,
> or even over an lvm volume. There may be some stack issues on x86 boxes
> still, I'm working on slimming that down. I hope that more real-world
> use will shake out any remaining problems.
>
> ... and I suppose I should put this into a wiki page:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraExt4
>
> We can keep it updated with any further issues or resolutions.
>
> Thanks!
> -Eric
>
I "converted" my USB backup filesystem to ext4dev as described in this
thread, and then did my normal rsync.
FWIW, here are the messages from rsync and unmount:
Number of files: 349883
Number of files transferred: 103441
Total file size: 58603101927 bytes
Total transferred file size: 21723026327 bytes
Literal data: 21723032689 bytes
Matched data: 0 bytes
File list size: 8350613
File list generation time: 0.149 seconds
File list transfer time: 0.000 seconds
Total bytes sent: 21738442241
Total bytes received: 2062982
sent 21738442241 bytes received 2062982 bytes 4469216.82 bytes/sec
total size is 58603101927 speedup is 2.70
Feb 9 13:01:13 localhost kernel: EXT4-fs: mballoc: 18135 blocks 18135
reqs (0 success)
Feb 9 13:01:13 localhost kernel: EXT4-fs: mballoc: 18135 extents
scanned, 8932 goal hits, 9203 2^N hits, 0 breaks, 0 lost
Feb 9 13:01:13 localhost kernel: EXT4-fs: mballoc: 1161 generated and
it took 15700652
Feb 9 13:01:13 localhost kernel: EXT4-fs: mballoc: 5636543
preallocated, 305084 discarded
No perceived problems.
However, gnome-mount does not seem to automagically detect ext4dev
type file systems, and silently fails.
"gnome-mount --fstype ext4dev" does work, however.
tom
--
Tom London
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