Hi,
On Tue, Jun 06, 2000 at 12:50:33AM +1000, David Luyer wrote:
>
> Besides which, the reiserfs on-disk format sounds like they've handled it
> better than the ext2fs transition[1], backwards compatibility with optional
> automatic conversion by specifying a mount option, as opposed to backwards
> compatibility but you have to re-build your filesystem if you want to change
> up in formats.
That's completely mis-stating the ext2 case. ext2 uses filesystem
feature flags to make sure that upgrades don't ever change the format,
but if you do use any newer, incompatible features (eg. you start
creating >2GB files), the feature flag gets set preventing an older
kernel from blindly following pointers and potentially corrupting the
filesystem.
Heck, you can even convert between ext2 and ext3 transparently, and
back, without a filesystem rebuild. And e2fsck will clear any unneeded
feature bits for you once you have stopped using that feature. The
ext2 feature protection goes all the way back to 2.0.
--Stephen
-
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 - 21:00:25 EST