include ext4

[Theodore Tso]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 09:27:19PM +0100, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> I wonder how comfortable the ext4 upstream would be with a distribution
> enabling it by default, and not encouraging users to be at least
> conversant enough to build their own kernel.

As long as people are appropriately warned about not using it on
production servers just yet, I have no problem.  Fedora 9 shipped it
although you had to give something like "yes-i-know-ext4-is-a-
development-filesystem" or some such on the boot line.  I believe
Fedora 10 is going to be shipping ext4 fully enabled, and I am working
with a particular enterprise distribution to release ext4 in preview
form in an upcoming service pack.  Which would be another way of
saying that yes, we would be quite comfortable.

I might be a little worried if you were talking about enabling it for
Intrepid, mainly because the ext4 patch set for 2.6.26 is still pretty
large, and I'd prefer not to have to do a lot of patch backporting.
You're not thinking about enabling it for Intrepid, are you?  You're
pretty late in feature freeze by now, and there were was a rather
large number of ext4-related bug fixes since e2fsprogs 1.41.0.  (Most
are in e2fsprogs 1.41.1 and there will be an e2fsprogs 1.41.2
relatively soon.)  And if you didn't include the 2.6.26-ext4-7
patchset in the intrepid kernel, the one thing I would *strongly*
recommend doing at the very least would be to patch ext4 to make
nodelalloc the default mount option.  (Nearly all of the bug fixes in
2.6.26-ext4-7 and since then have been delayed allocation-related, for
example in disk full situations.)

So are we talking about enabling it for Intrepid or Intrepid+1?

       	  	  		    	- Ted