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Re: Journaling patches



On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 02:24:15PM +0200, Pavel Cahyna wrote:
> On Wed, May 07, 2008 at 02:33:02AM +1000, Simon Burge wrote:
> > [ Oops, let this one slip through ]
> > 
> > Christos Zoulas wrote:
> > 
> > > My only concern about applying the patch to current is that the on-disk
> > > layout of the log might change and people will need to have a way to 
> > > upgrade
> > > their log format. For that we need to make sure that all versions of WAPBL
> > > filesystems are clearly recognizable.
> > 
> > Do you mean the on-disk layout in terms of the contents of the journal,
> > or the location of the journal?
> > 
> > If the former, I believe that we're just journaling physical block
> > changes, so the format there won't change.  To be honest, I don't know
> > any more about the contents of the journal itself.
> > 
> > For the latter, currently the journal is at the end of the filesystem's
> > partition.  Some other (as yet unimplemented!) options are internal to
> > the filesystem (as I believe Solaris does it), battery backed RAM, and
> > to an external partition/device.
> > 
> > Currently, we just use a bit in the fs_flags member of the ffs
> > superblock.  One suggestion is to use a few of the reserved parts of
> > the superblock (eg fs_sparecon64) to keep track of journal location
> > information.  Maybe have:
> > 
> >     int64_t fs_journalflags;
> >     int64_t fs_journalloc0;
> >     int64_t fs_journalloc1;
> 
> Could you please use this opportunity to implement an ext2fs-like
> versioning scheme for FFS features? Briefly, there should be three bitmaps
> of flags: one for fully compatible new features (code that does not
> understand them can fully use the filesystem), read-only compatible
> features (code that does not understand them must use the filesystem
> read-only, otherwise it might damage it) and incompatible features (code
> that does not understand them can't use the filesystem at all).
> 
> See the section "Feature Compatibility" in Documentation/ext2.txt in Linux
> kernel sources for more information.

Put a plist on disk instead. But some form of versioning would be great!

Take care,

Bill

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