Re: Agenda for ext3 developer interlock call (June 21th, 2006, 8:00PCT)

Hi,

On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 18:46 -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:

> 2) Bug fixes to fix 32-bit cleanliness issues, security/oops problems
> will go into fs/ext3, but all new development work will go into
> fs/ext4.  There is some question about whether relatively low risk
> features such as slimming the extX in-core memory structure, and
> delayed allocation for ext3,

Delayed allocation is something that I'd expect to be ext4, simply
because it's such a change to the core IO paths.

On the other hand, some of the lowest-risk changes on the horizon _do_
actually change the format --- for example, changes to use some of the
>128-byte-inode extra space to extend the epoch, add fine-grained
timestamps, and extend i_nlinks.  Some of those might be both useful and
low-risk enough to qualify for ext3 just from a perspective of code
churn; but from an end-user compatibility perspective we'd want them to
be ext4-only, I guess.

> 4) At some point, probably in 6-9 months when we are satisified with
> the set of features that have been added to fs/ext4, and confident as
> to their reliability, we will submit a patch which causes the fs/ext4
> code to register itself as the ext4 filesystem.  At that point, we may
> also request that fs/ext3 be deleted and that fs/ext4 register itself
> as supporting the ext3 filesystem as well.

I don't think we'll be ready to remove ext3 any time soon.  I'm minded
of some subtle locking bugs that got introduced in 2.6.5 and were there
for nearly a year before being finally cured.

The final change from ext3dev to ext4 should definitely be done to mark
the "reasonably feature-complete" stage, so that users have some
confidence that their new ext4 filesystems will be usable on future ext4
kernels without requiring further upgrades.  But I still think we'll
want to keep ext3's existing codebase around for quite a while as we
shake out the new features.

Cheers,
 Stephen



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