On Fri, 2011-02-04 at 11:17 -0600, James Bottomley wrote: > On Fri, 2011-02-04 at 12:03 -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote: > > On 02/04/2011 08:17 AM, Jan Kara wrote: > > > On Thu 03-02-11 11:32:01, Michael Rubin wrote: > > >> On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 7:08 AM, Eric Sandeen<sandeen@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > >>> If we can have a real plan for moving in this direction though, I'd > > >>> support it. I'm just not sure how we get enough real testing under > > >>> our belts to be comfortable with dropping ext[23], especially as > > >>> most distros now default to ext4 anyway. > > >> Eric what sort of testing are you looking for? > > > I believe Ted wrote a good summary of what combinations of options would > > > need to be tested on a regular basis to get at least some confidence that > > > the switch could work. > > > > > >> I admit I like having ext2 around for comparisons in bug situations. > > >> It really helps to isolate the problem area. How painful is the > > >> upkeep? > > > Well, for me it's a couple of hours per week on average I'd say. Plus > > > there is some work other people do when changing some VFS/MM interfaces > > > influencing all the filesystems. > > > > > > The time I spend is enough to keep ext3 in a good shape I believe but I > > > have a feeling that ext2 is slowly bitrotting. Sometime when I look at > > > ext2 code I see stuff we simply do differently these days and that's just > > > a step away from the code getting broken... It would not be too much work > > > to clean things up and maintain but it's a work with no clear gain (if you > > > do the thankless job of maintaining old code, you should at least have > > > users who appreciate that ;) so naturally no one does it. > > > > > > Honza > > > > I would definitely be interesting in figuring out if and when we can drop one or > > both of ext2 and ext3. The number of actively supported file systems to test for > > correctness and performance is getting to be a challenge. > > ext2 yes ... I think there's no way we can drop ext3: it's still a > current default filesystem for most distributions. Now, if we discuss > dropping ext2 and working out an end of life plan for ext3 (for the > feature removals schedule) so we don't eventually get into the same > position with it as we are with ext2, then this sounds like a plan. > I second this. Clearly we see ext2 is sunsetting, especially given ext4 has no journal mode already. For ext3, it still widely used by many users, though we have a way to migrate ext3 to ext4 there but still it require quit brainstorming to figure out what need to improve in ext4 to handle ext3 filesystem files more smoothly. Having a plan discussion sounds interesting to me. Mingming > > Great topic, might require beer though to be done right :) > > I'm invoking the anti-discrimination statutes here on behalf of those of > us who don't like beer. > > James > > > -- > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in > the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html -- 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
