Re: [RFC 0/13] extents and 48bit ext3

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Andrew Morton wrote:
On Fri, 09 Jun 2006 11:40:03 -0400
Jeff Garzik <[email protected]> wrote:

Users are now forced to remember that, if they write to their filesystem after using either $mmver or $korgver kernels, they are locked out of using older kernels.

The same happens if we create ext4 - earlier kernels don't support that,
either.

I suppose we could call it ext4, although that wouldn't make much
difference operationally.  The developers would probably choose to generate
ext4 from the same codebase as ext3 for maintainability reasons, rather
than choosing to copy-n-modify.  We'd need to see the patches to be able to
finally make that judgement.

I would propose the obvious... 'cp -a ext3 ext4', apply the extent and 48bit patches, and then do the obvious search-n-replace.

I guarantee that developer momentum would take over from there. Rather than fundamentally change ext3, let's let it stabilize.


And as features continue to be added in this manner, this problem gets _exponentially_ worse.

"continue to be added"?  afaik this is the first time this has happened,
and there's no plan to do it again.

ext3 developers are _fundamentally changing_ the block allocation structure [in a good way]. If they can get away with it once, they will continue to modify ext3, adding btrees and other new gadgets. That's just human nature. For example, htree was a minor disaster, deployment-wise, on the distro vendor side.

I think extents and 48bit are so fundamental that it's silly to attempt to minimize the impact from the user's perspective, and moreover, I think Linux benefits more if ext3 is _not_ kept on life support this way.

We need to draw a line in the sand.  If we don't, no one ever will.

	Jeff



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