[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: partman recipes and deprecation of ext2



On 2024-11-09 17:43, Felix Miata wrote:
Ben Hutchings composed on 2024-11-10 01:50 (UTC+0100):

The ext2 filesystem uses 32-bit timestamps and will be unable to
represent timestamps beyond early 2038.  It is now deprecated in Linux
for this reason.

As we're generally moving to 64-bit time times in the trixie release, I
think it's time to address this in partman, so far as possible.

Currently many of the partman recipes specify ext2 for the /boot
partition.  In some cases I expect that this is necessary due to
limitations of older boot loaders.  For mainstream architectures using
GRUB to boot, ext4 can be used for the /boot partition.

Should I start proposing specific changes or does someone else have
time to work on this?

Last week I was under a misunderstanding that upgrading EXT2 filesystems to EXT4 would be a satisfactory solution to eventual 64 bit timestamp support necessity, when it turns out some EXT4 filesystems suffer the same condition. EXT4 supported, and supports, inode size 128, as does EXT2. I had quite a number of EXT2, as well as having EXT4 configured with 128. Only after I managed to get most of my EXT2s converted to EXT4 did I discover the 128 byte inodes on those converted from EXT2
to EXT4 do not support timestamps after January 2038. Furthermore, EXT4
filesystems with feature flex_bg cannot be converted to 256 byte inode size by simply using e2fsck and tune2fs. So, all those already converted EXT2s need another conversion, /and/ many more than not of my (much large quantity of) EXT4s
need complete reformats. :(

Simply switching to EXT4 for /boot/ won't go far enough. Small sizes of those EXT4s suited to /boot/ use by default feature 128 byte inodes. Formatting those may require explicit use of '-I 256', and/or a change to mke2fs.conf to prevent
small EXT4s from misfeaturing 128 byte inodes.

Niltze [Hello], Mr. 'Team OS/2' peer -

Have you considered using JFS for your /boot partition(s)? Just a suggestion, of course!

--
Best Professional Regards.

--
Jose R R
http://metztli.it
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OS/2 for SMP v2.11 with HPFS386 hack: https://vimeo.com/894930798
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Download Metztli Reiser4: Debian Bookworm w/ Linux 5.17.13-1 AMD64
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
feats ZSTD compression https://sf.net/projects/metztli-reiser4/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Official current Reiser4 resources: https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/


Reply to: