Mounting ext3fs partition

[Fernando Apesteguía]

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 11:01 PM, Josh Carroll <josh.carroll at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi josh,
>>
>> Exactly, it is 256. So according to you, I can't use the mounted
>> filesystem, right?
>>
>> Could you please explain in more detail, what the problem is?
>>
>> Thanks in advance.
>
> I believe around e2fsprogs version 1.40.5 or so, they changed the
> default inode size from 128 to 256. The current ext2fs driver in
> FreeBSD has a hard-coded inode size defined:
>
> #define EXT2_INODE_SIZE            128
>
> I have a patch that dynamically determines this size, but I do not yet
> have a good enough understanding of the ext2/3 spec to decide if the
> changes I made are sufficient to fix the problem or if there is some
> risk of breakage because the extra 128 is required for some metadata
> of some sort.
>
> What happened in your case is something I was afraid of and what
> prompted me to look into a fix in the first place - namely, newer
> Linux distributions or even file systems created by e2fsprogs from
> ports in FreeBSD will be unusable with the current ext2fs driver,
> since it assumes a size of 128.
>
> There is some more information here regarding the patch and its current status:
>
> http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/stable/2008-11/msg00421.html
>
> I (or even better, someone more knowledgeable about file systems) need
> to read through the ext2/3 spec and determine if the changes I've made
> cause any breakage.

Ok,

Thanks for the clarification and overall, thanks for the work of
submitting the patch regardless of it is merged yet or not.

>
> Thanks,
> Josh
>