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Re: Beta1 missing decisions and possible timeline



On Monday 04 February 2008, Frans Pop wrote:
> You've probably seen that a new grub has been uploaded, which should
> solve this issue for unstable and etch^Wlenny.
>
> However, there are also plans to use the Lenny Beta release of the
> installer for "Etch+1/2" installations: installs of Etch, but with a
> newer kernel (either 2.6.22 or 2.6.24).
> As I don't expect the etch version of grub will be changed to support 256
> byte inodes, we need to solve this in the installer.

For the record, here are the most relevant parts of an IRC conversation I've 
just had with Ted Ts'o on this (copied with permission).
The resulting change for the etch-support udeb has already been committed.

[tytso] It would be nice to get the 256 byte inodes support sooner rather 
than later because it means significantly better performance for SELinux 
and Samba, plus the ext4 forwards compatibility.
[tytso] But if the new grub isn't going to make the etch point release, I 
guess we don't have a choice.
[fjp]   Are other arches known safe, or is it basically unknown whether 
there are any issues with 256 support?
[tytso] It probably makes sense to use the same default inode size for the 
root filesystem for all architectures, I agree.
[tytso] To be honest, I'm not sure if there are issues for the other 
architectures.
[tytso] We uncovered the grub issue on Fedora, since FC9 is going to ship 
with ext4 support, if all goes well.
[fjp]   OK. Then the only real option is to be conservative.
[tytso] Yes, I agree that conservative is the better choice here.
[fjp]   What about the sed command I use to change the default? Should that 
be safe for the next 6 months or so?
[fjp]   sed -ir "s/(inode_size =) 256/\1 128/" /etc/mke2fs.conf
[tytso] you'd want to change that before the lenny D-I beta to add ext4 
support.
[tytso] But for the etch + 0.5  D-I release, I assume once you snapshot the 
e2fsprogs.udeb, it wouldn't change from that point on, right?
[fjp]   Well, some installation methods pull the udeb from lenny mirrors at 
install time.
[tytso] Hmm.....
[fjp]   So I'd like to be safe against future changes in defaults in 
unstable/testing too.
[tytso] Well, in the next 2 months we will be adding ext4 support to 
e2fsprogs.   But if you make that a global search and replace, and not just 
replace the first instance of inode_size=256, it should be OK for the etch 
D-I.
[fjp]   I could also just snapshot the whole conf file and just replace it.
[tytso] that would be safer.
[fjp]   OK. Will do.

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