ext2 v1.32 vs. v1.39

Jarod Wilson jarod at wilsonet.com
Wed Dec 17 12:25:53 EST 2008


On Mon, 2008-12-15 at 17:46 -0500, Michael ODonnell wrote:
> I note that RHEL3 kernels seem to be unhappy (griping about
> max inode count or some such) when asked to mount a v1.39
> filesystem created using RHEL5 but the RHEL5 kernels mount
> the older filesystems without complaint.

I suspect that part of it is because RHEL5 supports 2x as big an ext3
volume as RHEL3 (8TB vs. 16TB), so a higher max inode count than RHEL3.

> We're in the process
> of moving some users forward from RHEL3 to RHEL5 so I wonder
> if it matters whether we rebuild their v1.32 filesystems from
> scratch (metadata and all) or instead leave them intact and just
> replace the files therein.  I've not found anyplace online that
> offers straightforward comparisons of the various versions of
> the ext2 filesystem, and I'm wondering if there are important
> differences, either WRT performance, security or reliability...

There have definitely been performance improvements in the ext3 kernel
code between RHEL3 and RHEL5, but I'm not sure offhand if any of them
would require reformatting w/the newer e2fsprogs to take advantage of
them (outside of >8TB volume support).



-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com



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