[pkg-fso-maint] rootfstype Re: OpenMoko FreeRunner Debian installation report

Lionel Elie Mamane lionel at mamane.lu
Tue Jul 28 08:40:23 UTC 2009


On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 10:28:56AM +0200, Steffen Moeller wrote:
> Lionel Elie Mamane wrote:
>> On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 03:29:10PM +0200, Steffen Moeller wrote:

>>> I was less happy to hear about the default of a ext2-mount of the ext3-formatted
>>> partition, which Lionel has previously reported.

>>> The defaults are

>>> SD_PART1_FS=${SD_PART1_FS:-ext2}
>>> SD_PART1_SIZE=${SD_PART1_SIZE:-8}
>>> SD_PART2_FS=${SD_PART2_FS:-ext3}
>>> SD_SWAP_SIZE=${SD_SWAP_SIZE:-0}

>>> and I cannot see what is wrong with this, except that the docs should possibly be changed
>>> for the defaults of the second partion's FS. The PART2 is not placed into /etc/fstab by
>>> default as it seems.

>> That's not it, it is configure-uboot.sh which sets
>> "rootfstype=ext2". Changing that to rootfstype=ext3 solves the
>> problem.

> Ah. ok. I never touched the uboot parts since I don't use it. I
> recall that there was a constraint towards ext2 somehow - whoever
> could clarify the issue for the archives (again?), please step
> forward.

Grub has the following "problem" with ext3 (and journal filesystems in
general), which by similarity uboot may have: it does not know about
the journal, so if the filesystem is not cleanly unmounted, it runs
the risk of not being able to read it. I can imagine that as long as
the file (and the directory it is in and the parent directory and its
parent, etc) are not touched by the journal, it would still work, I'm
not sure. On my desktops / laptops I usually have an ext2 /boot
partition mounted "sync" for this reason.

-- 
Lionel



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