call for brave ext4 testers in F9, with caveats

[Joachim Frieben]

On 2/7/08, Eric Sandeen <sandeen at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>
> At one point the rescue disk was "claiming" ext3 filesystems as ext4dev;
> that was a bug that should be fixed now, and recent kernels have the
> permanent upstream "failsafe check" to avoid that put into place*.  I'm
> guessing that's what happened?  Although that bug was only with root
> filesystems AFAIK.  Did you ever intentionally mount it as ext4dev?


After earlier positive results using ext4dev with FC6 test releases, I had
deliberately mounted all corresponding partitions as ext4dev only to realize
later on that in contrast with FC6 test X, this had become a one way street.
The file system check was introduced the very next day which was a good
thing because otherwise, your system became unbootable after the next kernel
update, and even after reinstalling your system, you were forced to use a
"rawhide" kernel in order to be able to mount your home volume.

As far as going back to ext3 - if you have extent-format files on the
> filesystem, you can find them, mount with -o noextents, and copy the
> files back & forth to "un-extentify" them, then we could use tune2fs to
> remove the extents flag to get you back to ext3.  But if you've been
> running /home as ext4dev for a while, it's probably got a lot of
> extent-format files.
>
> Also if you need to repair it, so far there is no released e2fsprogs
> which can do that.  If you have an emergency let me know, and we'll get
> something going.


With a suitable backup media this is no issue, since you can simply reformat
your home volume as ext3 and restore you data afterwards. I suppose this
applies to most users.

But, good news you've not noticed any problems, even if it was not
> intentional....
>
> Thanks,
> -Eric


I will keep an eye on it but again, I haven't noticed any issue since this
"migration".
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