64-bit support has been around for 7 years (since e2fsprogs 1.41). And yes, e2fsprogs 1.43 now has the ability to convert a file system from 32-bit to 64-bit, but this is an inherently dangerous thing to do, since it requires rewriting the inode table. If you ever crash or power fail during the conversion, *boom*, you can lose all or most of your data. So the conversion can be used as a short cut where you back up the whole file system, and then try to convert to 64-bit, and if it succeeds, then you don't have to do the restore step. If it crashes and you lose everything, then you can reformat the file system and restore from backups. :-) In general, I assume that embedded developers are more sophisticated than users (who will use the mke2fs in the installer to install thier root file system, which will be a matched set with the bootloader). I also can't be responsible for crappy, obsolete bootloader on embedded devices, some of which have device drivers only available in ancient BSP kernels using 3.10, etc. Also, people who care can always edit /etc/mke2fs.conf to adjust the defaults. > While doing some research I read that it also broke compatibility with > a few other things. I am not sure what the best solution is, I was > just surprised how this compatibility-breaking change was made with as > far as I know not much warning to the community or when running the > command or something. It's documented in the Release Notes. You're the first person who has complained. Part of it is that community distributions have a much lower threshold of compatibility requirements compared with, say, enterprise distributions. Enterprise distribution vendors are free to edit /etc/mke2fs.conf in their packages if they want to be more conservative. Similarly, with Debian, we enabled the meta checksum feature in the testing distribution precisely so we could get more users testing the code and submitting bug report. Community distributions have always been more aggressive --- so in general, users aren't whining when Fedora 25 ships Wayland which might have some incompatibilities with hardware and software. Instead they are (in general) happy that Fedora is taking an aggressive stance with Wayland. Someone has to be first to release software.... - Ted -- 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
