Re: mke2fs and mount problem

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

> Isn't there still a comment in the source for mount saying that
> the minix default is only temporary until ext2 stabilises?

The best default is to not fill in the field at all. Then the kernel
uses its own default, which is to try filesystems in a pre-set order
until one works. The order is purposely made so that msdos comes last
because it's most likely to have a false-positive result when identifying
if a filesystem belongs to it.

The reason this default was not used was that it was difficult to figure
out which filesystem type was used if the mount succeeded, and we needed
to put that information in /etc/mtab . However, this has been repaired in
recent kernels (1.3.8x) because they provide /proc/mounts, which is compatible
with /etc/mtab and has a correct definition of the filesystem type.

If you look at my own mount program in the boot-floppies package
/usr/src/boot-floppies-1.1.0/utilities/busybox/mount.c, you can see how
it uses the "zero default" and then copies the filesystem type from
/proc/mounts back to /etc/mtab .

	Thanks

	Bruce
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