Bug#520009: ext3 'data=foo' on root fs is broken

[Peter Samuelson <peter@p12n.org>]

Package: initramfs-tools
Version: 0.92o
Severity: normal

ext3 includes mount option 'data={ordered,writeback,journal}'.
However, it also has a restriction that you cannot change the 'data='
parameter with 'remount'.  Therefore, you have to pass the correct one
at initial mount time, even though the data= parameter does not
directly affect a read-only fs.  If you don't specify, you get
data=ordered.

initramfs-tools should not pick up data= from /etc/fstab, but it does
not.  The workaround is 'rootflags=data=foo' on the kernel command
line.

The consequence is that the root fs cannot be remounted rw:

    EXT3-fs: cannot change data mode on remount
    mount: / not mounted already, or bad option


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to bash

Versions of packages initramfs-tools depends on:
ii  cpio                2.9-13      GNU cpio -- a program to manage archives of
ii  findutils           4.4.0-2     utilities for finding files--find, xargs
ii  klibc-utils         1.5.12-2    small utilities built with klibc for early
ii  module-init-tools   3.4-1       tools for managing Linux kernel modules
ii  udev                0.125-7     /dev/ and hotplug management daemon

Versions of packages initramfs-tools recommends:
ii  busybox             1:1.10.2-2  Tiny utilities for small and embedded syste

initramfs-tools suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information