Unfortunately, this has already been merged into the mainline branch before I noticed this, but we have a nasty bug right now in the uninit_groups handling. Note this code here in ext2fs_set_gdt_csum(): /* Even if it wasn't zeroed, by the time this function is * called by e2fsck we have already scanned and corrected * the whole inode table so we may as well not overwrite it. * This is just a hint to the kernel that it could do lazy * zeroing of the inode table if mke2fs didn't do it, to help * out if we need to do a full itable scan sometime later. */ if (!(bg->bg_flags & (EXT2_BG_INODE_UNINIT | EXT2_BG_INODE_ZEROED))) fs->group_desc[i].bg_flags |= EXT2_BG_INODE_ZEROED; There's only one problem. ext2fs_set_gdt_csum() is also called by mke2fs, so all of the block groups are having the EXT2_BG_INODE_ZEROED bit set. I'm also not entirely sure this is safe for e2fsck, since as far as I can tell, e2fsck does *not* currently scan zero uninitialized portions of the inode table. It uses the ext2fs_get_next_inode() function, which will skip uninitialized inodes. So, I think what needs to happen is that the above fragment in csum.c:ext2fs_set_gdt_csum() needs to disappear. Is there a kernel patch that will zero out the inode tables in the background? I remember hearing discussions of this, but it doesn't seem to be in the kernel tree or in the ext4 patch queue. Eventually, we might want to add a feature to e2fsck (probably controlled by e2fsck.conf or a command-line option?) to zero out the inode table, and then we can clear the INODE_ZERO'ed bg_flags. Jose, Andreas, does this make sense? - Ted P.S. I noticed this because I had added to dumpe2fs the ability to show the INODE_ZEROED flag, and noticed it was set when I was *not* expecting it to be set. -- 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
