2.2 kernel and ext3 filesystems

Was the ext3 filesystem ever back ported to the 2.2 kernel series?

thanks,
-chuck

It was written for 2.2, and then forward-ported.

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/sct/ext3/v2.2/

Interesting. I looked at the system running 2.2, and there are no ext3 options in the running config file. It may have been later than 2.2.22...

All of this made me remember that an ext3 filesystem can be mounted as ext2, so I got done what I really needed anyway.

thanks for the reply,
-chuck

         ^^^^^^

"written for" is not the same as "included in" ;-)

Good :-)

ext3 was originally written for 2.2 but was never merged into the
mainstream kernel. That happened in 2.4.15.

There were also some bug fixes that I'm pretty sure were never backported into the 2.2 tree....

- Ted

I may be being stung by this as we speak.

I mounted this ext3 filesystem as ext2 on my 2.2.16 kernel system. I made some changes to some files (simple edits), and now when I reboot the box in 2.2.16, I get the following:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb2,
or too many mounted filesystems

in /var/log/messages I see:
EXT2-fs warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck is recommended
EXT2-fs: ide0(3,66): couldn't mount because of unsupported optional features.

I'm reticent to run any e2fsck as old as 2.2.16 kernel version against this filesystem, in fear of damaging it. Is this a sane thing to consider, or do I need to put this disk back into a more recent box and try to mount it/ fsck it there?

Alternatively, where might I dig up an ext3 patch against linux-2.2.x, so I can build a kernel that will support this? I assume I would need file utilities that support it as well?

thanks,
-chuck

e2fsck is not tied to any particular kernel version. You should be able to see the features that ext2 is complaining about with "dumpe2fs -h /dev/hdb2" in the "Features" line. I'm guessing it's "needs_recovery" that ext2 doesn't like. That means that you didn't unmount the ext3 filesystem cleanly and now ext2 can't mount it. Running any non-prehistoric version of e2fsck will fix it, but as always newer versions are better. Once e2fsck has cleaned up the journal, it can be mounted by older kernels as ext2 again.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/