Re: partman recipes and deprecation of ext2
Hi Ben,
On 10/11/2024 at 01:50, Ben Hutchings wrote:
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.
What exactly is deprecated ? The ext2 standalone driver (which is
disabled in Debian kernels), ext2 support in the ext4 driver, or both ?
IIUC 64-bit timestamps require at least 256-byte inodes, and ext2
supports 256-byte inodes. Or am I missing something ?
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.
partman-auto currently has two kinds of recipes:
- those which always create a /boot partition (alpha, non-efi arm*,
hppa, mipsel, some powerpc and ppc64, sparc*)
- those which create an optional /boot partition only with LVM (default,
efi, some power-pc and ppc64, ppc64el, riscv64)
I guess that the first kind are for architectures which may use boot
loaders which do not support ext4, and the second kind could use ext4 or
$default_filesystem (used for the root partition in all recipes, default
is set to ext4 for linux in partman-base).
Should I start proposing specific changes or does someone else have
time to work on this?
I helped prepare the recent changes in partman-auto recipes and can help
implementing this change but I do not know about limitations of boot
loaders other than grub. As part of the recent changes, partman-auto now
includes a script which generates default recipes and recipes for
"current" architectures: amd64, armhf, arm64, ppc64el, riscv64. Updating
and running this script in the source tree should be the preferred way
of updating built-in recipes.
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