On Tue, Apr 08, 2003 at 10:37:51AM +0200, Juri Haberland wrote: > > I'm already maintaining an EXT3 faq (since 2000?) at > http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/FAQs/ext3-faq.html > > or Google -> "ext3 faq" -> "I'm feeling lucky" :) Actually, the URL appears to be http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/FAQs/ext3-faq.html ... but the Google approach works just fine. :-) Couple of suggestions. If you could add a <A NAME="du-df"> to the question, that would be great, since I anticipate needing to point people to it a lot, that would be great. Also, the questions and answers about converting between version 1 and version 2 of the journal will probably not be needed by the vast majority of the users these days. (It only really applies to people who started using journalling with the early ext3 code and the 2.2 kernel.) So it might be a good idea put them in a historical section, with an explanation that most users won't need to worry about this. Otherwise, it might confuse newbies that are just starting to play with ext3 today. In the question "I compiled ext3 as a module and my / partition gets mounted as ext2", I would suggest replacing the answer with the following: ------------ Begin new answer If you have ext2 compiled into the kernel and ext3 as a module and your root filesystem is ext2/3, then the kernel will always mount the root fs as ext2 and not as ext3 since at the time when the root filesystem is mounted, the kernel does not have access to the modules, since they are located on the root filesystem. (This is a chicken and egg problem!) If you have this setup, you might first want to consider whether it makes sense to compile ext3 as a module. If you want to use ext3 on your root filesystem, the ext3 filesystem module will always be loaded and can not be unloaded, so it might as well be compiled-in. Furthermore, modules waste a tiny amount of memory (on average 2k per module), and take up an extra entry in the TLB cache --- a slight, and perhaps not measurable disadvantage, but given that there is no real advantage to compiling ext3 as a module, why bother? If you do want to compile ext3 as a module and use it as your root filesystem, it can be done, but what you must do is do is boot into an initial ramdisk (initrd) image as your root image. This initrd image will contain the necessary modules (scsi, ext3, etc.) so you can mount your "real" root filesystem and then use pivot_root to replace the initrd root filesystem with the "real" root filesystem. Most distributions do the pivot_root trick automatically, but they differ in how the tool which builds the initrd image needs to be called. <UL> <LI> On a SuSE system you have to put "jbd ext3" (in this order!) into the YaST setting INITRD_MODULES. Then do a mk_initrd and it should work. <LI> On a Red Hat system it seems that it is sufficiant to just do a mkinitrd. <LI> On a Debian system (woody and above) the you must run the command: "mkinitrd -o boot/initrd.img-2.4.18-386 /lib/modules/2.4.18-386" where "2.4.18-386" must be substituted with the version number of the debian kernel which you are currently using. Note: this requires that you have the initrd-tools package installed, and if you currently are not using an initrd setup, your lilo or grub configuration files must be modified to tell the booting kernel to use the initrd image. </UL> ------------------ End new answer Other than that these minor changes, the FAQ looks pretty good! Thanks for taking the time to write it. - Ted _______________________________________________ Ext3-users@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
