Re: [Dump-devel] support other filesystems

[Stelian P. <st...@po...>]

Le mercredi 13 août 2008 à 18:59 +0400, Daneel Yaitskov a écrit :
> Hi everybody!
> 
> I would like to request will developers go to add the support other
> filesystems sush as the reiserfs and the ext4. Ted Tso has said at 30
> June 2008 that after a few weeks the ext4 will become stable.

The support of multiple filesystems in dump has been on the TODO list
for a long time now. It is not so simple because the internal dump data
(tape) format is heavily based on the ext2 internals, and converting the
metadata from some other filesystem (say reiserfs) is bound to be
difficult and lossy.

However, ext4 support is different, because as an evolution of
ext2/ext3, it may (emphasise on *may*) be much simpler to do.

I'm not sure if e2fsprogs fully understands ext4 filesystems yet (dump
does heavily use the libext2fs routines), and since ext4 doesn't use
fixed block sizes anymore, but "[offset, length] pairs", something needs
to be done to put the data in fixed size dump blocks.

Unfortunately, I don't really have the time to do this ATM.

But since you're seeking a way to contribute to dump (as I've seen in a
later post), you're welcome to look at this feature, investigate the
issues, and try cooking up a patch.

Stelian.
-- 
Stelian Pop <st...@po...>