Heads up on ext4 changes

Eric Sandeen sandeen at redhat.com
Thu Oct 9 13:04:46 UTC 2008


The ext4 patchset for 2.6.28 contains several fixes as well as,
ultimately, a change in the name of the filesystem from "ext4dev" to
"ext4." (*) - I've pulled this in for F10.

This will also require an updated e2fsprogs, because there was a bug in
blkid which failed to recognize older "ext4dev" filesystems (those with
the test_fs flag set) as ext4, as it should have.  This caused them to
not mount automatically.

So long story short, you'll need to update kernel & e2fsprogs together,
if you have ext4(dev) filesystems and you need them to mount seamlessly.
 It's recoverable (just a mounting  failure) but I don't want anyone to
be too surprised.

There are anaconda changes as well, so until anaconda gets in sync,
installs on ext4 may not work (that renaming patch has been sent, too).

Thanks,
-Eric

(*)Yes, this does indicate that the ext4 developers feel it's time to
move on past the "dev" stage; as the patch says "The ext4 filesystem is
getting stable enough that it's time to drop the "dev" prefix." - as
with any filesystem, though, I still encourage you to back up important
data :)




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