This is mostly me blowing off a little steam here, so yeah. But maybe it won't hurt to send out a heads up and get this in the archives: Booting a 2.6.28-pre kernel will cause e2fsck to remove the test_fs flag from any filesystem it checks, presumably because "ext4dev" has become "ext4" in 2.6.28. If your root fs is on ext4, this makes it impossible to reboot back into a older kernel (i.e. < 2.6.28) since it will refuse to mount an ext4dev fs without the "test_fs" flag set -- unless you chase after e2fsck and set the flag back. It's not a huge deal -- and if you have your root on ext4dev before 2.6.28, you get an extra helping of "use at your own risk", anyway -- but it's an extra caveat that it might pay to be aware of. I didn't mention this when I ran into this before because that first 2.6.28-rc kernel I booted didn't crash after fsck cleared that flag, and I've just been working around it. I finally managed to get make one of my computers unbootable this morning because of this, though. It was user error, but now I have to take the box apart and put a CD drive in it, just so I can boot a live CD and set that &^*# flag again. Since (I'm guessing that) the bit that does the clearing seems to be in e2fsck, and not in the kernel, it doesn't seem like there's much that could be done about it. In hindsight though, a deprecation period might have been called for. Ehn, it could be worse; I could have lost data. Thanks. -- Joseph Fannin jfannin@xxxxxxxxx -- 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
