Ext3 as root filesystem?
Leonard den Ottolander
leonardjo at hetnet.nl
Sat Dec 6 14:57:33 UTC 2003
Hi Andy,
> I confess in the initrd I had copied them into /lib "to make things simple".
These kind of actions are (usually) unnecessary and should be avoided
unless you have a specific reason to do so. Ext3 is the file system of
choice on Red Hat and Fedora, so things are set up to "just work".
> After your email I improved this to keep the same /lib/modules/<ver>/...
> structure in the initrd, and I ran depmod with -a -b <fake root> on both the
> initrd and the root filesystem at generation time, and the modules are now
> to be found in the same place in the main root filesystem and the initrd.
Are you using a standard Red Hat kernel? Then both the initrd and the
module layout should work as is. If you compiled your own all you should
have to do is a mkinitrd. Path layout should be usable as well.
> EXT2-fs warning (device nbd(43,0)): ext2_read_super: mounting ext3
> filesystem as ext2
Are you sure you actually transformed the file system from ext2 to ext3
(tune2fs -j -c 0 -i 0 /dev/<partition>)? What does tune2fs -l
/dev/<partition> show you?
> Having ext3 is important, because the root filesystem is on another machine
> using the Network Block Device, it can be expected to experience rough
> treatment.
Using ext3 is also useful to avoid file system checks during boot.
Although you could achieve this by just issueing tune2fs -c 0 -i 0
/dev/<partition> on an ext2 partition. Of course you shouldn't be using an
ext2 file system in that state for too long to avoid file system errors.
> What prompts the kernel to try to load the ext3 modules?
The mount command itself, so the fact that the file system is described as
ext3 in /etc/fstab.
> Since this is all based on the Fedora initrd, I must be missing something or
> doing something (else) stupid, because Fedora has no trouble coming up on
> ext3 on my laptop HDD here :-(
I am sorry I have to agree with you on this ;-) . Ext3 should "just work".
Bye,
Leonard.
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