Linux 6.9 Deprecates The EXT2 File-System Driver

[carewolf]

boot should be FAT32.

Not the classic unix mount of /boot, that would be weird

[tuaris]

Good riddance. I remember my first encounter with Linux, and my first encounter with an improperly shut down system. My mind was boggled when I saw what happened afterwards. In the aftermath (and in my ignorance), I of course began to view FAT32 far more superior.

At least EXT3, and then 4, the situation was more palatable, but by that time I had given up on Linux (for many more reasons than just the file system) and moved on to FreeBSD. I never encountered such behavior with UFS.

To this day, I would never trust my data on EXT (any version), or Linux at all. I know it's silly and mostly from a bad experience. First impressions are important, and Linux/EXT did not do a good job.

UFS has never failed me once. ZFS is great too, and that's where I put my most valuable data.

[discordian]

The last bare metal install I did for my mom in Xubuntu 16.04 I used ext2 for /boot because I heard it was faster than ext4 and that is what I had been doing for years, ext2 for /boot ext4 or xfs for / and /home. It sounds like from the article that the ext4 driver can still read ext2 partitions so I should be OK?

using the ext4 driver gives you even more speed than ext2 - aslong you disable the journal:

```
mkfs.ext4 -O ^has_journal /dev/XYZ
```

[Anux]

Shouldn't the journal replay even be skipped if the file system has been cleanly unmounted?

There is a monthly? check but you can also disable it.

[junkbustr]

It will be interesting to see how many systems break on boot after the driver is finally removed. The entry in /etc/fstab denoting the file system as EXT2 mostly affects the process of kernel updates.

IMO, the "tribal knowledge" around formatting /boot as EXT2 is pretty sticky.

[S.Pam]

It will be interesting to see how many systems break on boot after the driver is finally removed. The entry in /etc/fstab denoting the file system as EXT2 mostly affects the process of kernel updates.

IMO, the "tribal knowledge" around formatting /boot as EXT2 is pretty sticky.

I think you're right. /ext2 boot is used quite a lot still. And ext4 driver can moubt it fine, which is what I did for years until UEFI with ESP. Fstab might be the issue for people, as you do have to change the ext2 to ext4. Hopefully distros will do this before letting users upgrade.

[TiCPU]

boot should be FAT32.

Only true for EFI system. Boot can contain symlinks.

[jabl]

Note that this won't affect most distros, since distro kernels are typically compiled with

CONFIG_EXT4_USE_FOR_EXT2=y

which means the ext4 driver is used for ext2 filesystems. Also note that earlier the ext3 driver was removed, and the ext4 driver has been used for ext3 filesystems for a long time already.

The ext2 driver has been left as a bare-bones driver for embedded systems that don't want to pay the bloat cost of that extra ext4 code in memory. But evidently they're thinking that it's now time to get rid of that driver as well and just use the ext4 driver for all ext2/3/4 filesystems unconditionally.

As for using FAT32 for the boot fs, yes UEFI mandates that the ESP is formatted as FAT32, and that is typically mounted as /boot/efi. If you have an additional /boot partition in addition to /boot/efi there's no reason to have that as FAT32; ext4 is a fine choice for that.

[lateo]

Only true for EFI system. Boot can contain symlinks.

Not to be pedant.

/boot : xfs or ext4
/boot/efi : vfat

You don't need to have your whole /boot in the crappy FAT format.

Edit : oopsie, jabl was there first ! :thumbup:

[mischael]

I remember that ext3 has a higher overhead, which is a good reason to use ext2 for Floppy drives.