[RFC] mke2fs with DIR_INDEX, RESIZE_INODE by default

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Sat, Apr 01, 2006 at 10:39:27PM -0800, Robinson Tiemuqinke wrote:
>  A stupid questions to ask: 
> 
>  How to turn on "resize_inode" feature for ext3 file
> system created with old mke2fs?
> 
>  Is there is a tool to upgrade old ext3 file systems
> so that they will also have "resize_inode" feature?

If you download the ext2resize program from SourceForge, it has a
program called "ext2resize" which will do this.  Neither Stephen when
he was integrating on-line resizing for Fedora/Red Hat Enterprise
Linux, nor I when considering how to integrate this functionality into
e2fsprogs, were comfortable with the code base enough to accept
responsibility for maintaining it in its current form, which is why
that functionality has not yet appeared in either RHEL4 nor in e2fsprogs.

That being said, I'm not aware of anyone who has lost data or any
other serious bugs in the ext2prepare program in ext2resize, aside
from the fact that it has portability problems on big-endian systems.
(One of ext2resize's problems is that it doesn't use libext2fs, but
rather rolled its own library functions, which clearly was never
tested on big-endian systems but which also has application-level
functionality folded into its library routines, making a port to
libext2fs more difficult than it ought to have been.)

In any case, since requesting on-line resizing is now integrated into
resize2fs, the only missing functionality only found in ext2resze is
the ext2prepare progam to reserve space on an already-created ext3
filesystem.  Adding this support is on my todo list, but to be honest
other development items for e2fsprogs are higher priority at the
moment.  If someone wants to try writing an ext2prepare-like program
using libext2fs, let me know, and I can give you an outline of what
needs to be done.

						- Ted