Re: (reiserfs) Re: New Linux 2.5 - 2.6 TODO (Alan Cox suggests delaying reiserfs integration)

From: Chris Mason (mason@suse.com)
Date: Mon Jun 05 2000 - 08:15:07 EST


On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Rik van Riel wrote:

> On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:
> > On 2000-06-05T13:26:54,
> > Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> said:
> >
> > > Rik is probably right. One thing we try very hard to do is to ensure you can
> > > always go backwards. 2.2.15 for example does nothing to your box that means
> > > you cannot go back to 2.2.0.
> >
> > I don't disagree here. 2.4.x and 2.4.y should always have compatible disk
> > formats - barring real hard bugs - for any x or y.
> >
> > However, as long as that is warranted, I don't see any problem with 2.x having
> > a different disk format than 2.y. (As long as such is clearly advertised)
>
> I don't think that's enough. When a user wants to try out
> 2.5 one evening, it should be possible to reboot back into
> 2.4 without having to reformat the disk.
>
> Reiserfs needs both forward and backward compatability as a
> default.
>

Just to clear up what formats work where ;-)

3.5.x (for the 2.2 kernel) can be mounted under 3.6.x without any
conversion. You can switch back and forth between 2.2 and 2.4
kernels without problems, but you can't have large files.

3.5.x formats can be mounted under 3.6.x with -o conv, which will allow
creating new large files (old ones still have 2GB limit). Once converted,
you cannot mount under 2.2 kernels again.

Hans' people (mostly Vladimir) are working on code to fully support the
3.6.x format under 2.2. kernels. This was the plan all along, it just
took us *much* longer to get the 3.6.x code stable than we thought it
would.

-chris

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jun 07 2000 - 21:00:21 EST