On Jan 23, 2008 11:53 -0500, Theodore Tso wrote: > Since I'm still hoping that > some point in the future, fs/ext4 could subsume fs/ext3 so we don't > have to worry about bug fixes going into fs/ext2 AND fs/ext3 AND > fs/ext4, I have my own reasons for wanting that. If any newbie kernel hacker wants a filesystem project, allowing ext4 to mount ext2 filesystems w/o a journal would be very useful. I suspect that a simple flag check in the ext4_journal_* wrappers of the jbd2 functions would be enough in many cases. One of the reasons to keep ext2 around is that ext3 cannot mount the filesystem without a journal, and removing that limitation for ext4 would bring us one step closer to removing a ton of duplicate code. Another reason for ext2 vs. ext3 was overhead from journaling, and that could also be removed by allowing ext4 to mount ext2 filesystems w/o a journal. Maybe a good proposal for a Google Summer-of-Code project. Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html