Re: Ext3?

["nate" <debian-user@aphroland.org>]

Josh Rehman said:

> There is no mention of ext3 at this location:
> http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch-partitioning.en.html

there are many different kernels available, check the kernel
configs on the sites(usually named kernel-config I think).

>
> So I have two questions:
> 1 - WHY don't the Debian powers-that-be consider the 2.4 kernel 'mature
> enough' for Debian 3.0?

Because it is not(IMO). I will not touch 2.4 with a 10 foot pole right
now. And I don't plan to for at least another 6-7 months. I use it on
SuSE 8, and I do not have any serious issues, but I still don't trust
it. I read kernel traffic every week and what I read does not inspire
confidence in 2.4 for me. I've been tracking kernel traffic for years
and it still scares me the kind of stuff that they are putting in
2.4(recently there was talk of replacing the scheduler in 2.4, then
another guy said no it wasn't stable enough, then the first guy said
well theres all these other changes that are going in that are more
invasive then this scheduler change).  But more to the point. 2.2.19
works for me. I don't even have a need to upgrade to 2.2.20 which is
well over a year old. New systems still get 2.2.19+patches. If I need
Promise ATA/100 support I use the ide-pci patch, if they are using
3ware cards, I use the updated 3ware driver, if they are servers I
use the openwall patch, if they have eepro or 3c59x cards I use the
newer drivers there respectivly. etc etc. 2.4.x doesn't do much of
what I need to justify such a major change. This is, of course,
IMO, but It may provide some insight to the 'decision makers' of
Debian on why they decided NOT to go with 2.4.x for the default for
most architechures(I think at least IA64 probably uses 2.4.x by
default since I haven't heard word of any port of 2.2.x to IA64??).
But at least they do make the 2.4 bootfloppies available to those
who wish to use it. By contrast, it was not until 2.2.10 when
I decided to deploy the 2.2.x kernel in production, I stayed on
2.0.36 for a long time. 2.2.10 came out about a year after 2.2.0
came out(I used the 2.1.xx series and early 2.2.x series at home),
2.4.x would have met this requirement of being 'out there for ~1 year'
for me but they had to yank the VM subsystem out and put in a new
one, since that is so very core to the kernel, I decided to put
it off another 6-12 months(the decision for them to do it
was probably a good one, but it's still a major change).

First time I tried 2.4 was on debian woody on an athlon 1300
a while back, I think it was 2.4.8 or something(single digit),
I compiled, told it to build for athlon, booted, every command
that ran I got "Illegal instruction". Couldn't even shutdown.
So I reset, recompiled for i686, and it went a little farther,
my software raid(0.36) arrays took about an hour to check
(disk performance went from 20MB/s to 2-3MB/s according to
ckraid), then when it tried to mount the filesystems it puked
again saying it couldn't find any raid arrays(even though
it had just finished checking them). Bad taste in my mouth!
(I posted a few times on this problem too)



> 2 - HOW can I install Debian 3.0 with a 2.4 kernel and an ext3
> filesystem?

According to the kernel-config, the 2.4 bootfloppies come with
ext3:
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian3.0r0/main/disks-i386/3.0.23-2002-05-21/bf2.4/kernel-config
I personally prefer reiserfs, it has been around longer, has been
in production longer(SuSE has used it for probably 2 years as their
default), runs on 2.2.x(though not on software raid 1-5). Again,
this is -IMO-. I don't mean to start a flamewar. SuSE's installer
even allows me to make a reiserfs filesystem using the "old" format
so I can load it on 2.2.x kernels(good for dual boot suse 2.4.18/debian 2.2.19
systems)

Now I am not certain if the installer actually uses ext3, but if all else
fails you can partition/format the filesystems before loading the installer
and just tell it use the existing filesystems in a worst case scenario.

Hopefully I'll get around to trying out the debian 3.0 installer soon.

I believe 2.4 is approaching the point where it will be stable enough,
maybe 2.4.20 or .21.

nate
(admin of about 60 servers, 20 desktops, at least till sept 27 ..)