On 08/04/2021 09:05 PM, John Forkosh wrote:
> Jimmy Johnson <jimmy@none.none> wrote:
>> Chris Elvidge wrote:
>>
>>> My Slack15 installation uses ext4.
>>
>> And so do I, but when 15 is released it will be installed on btrfs.
>
> What's the future of lilo with respect to all this?
> Is grub (or whatever) going to replace it as standard with slackware?

That I don't know, I use my own boot loader so I don't think about it
much, but I will be surprised if there is a major change in the
installer. Do you think there will be a RC for us to test?
--
Jimmy Johnson

Alien Core Linux - AMD A8-7600 - EXT4 at sda12
Registered Linux User #380263

On Thu, 05 Aug 2021 00:08:31 +1000, noel wrote:
> Is there any reason youve stuck to ext2?

I was not the original poster, but still I might give some such reasons
even though I have not tried Slackware-current and suffered any problems
with ext2.

Ext2 as opposed to ext3 and ext4 does not have journaling. Usually
journaling is a good thing and I use ext4 for my everyday use. However,
when I do backups to hard drives which are intended for "write once,
maybe read a few times" that journaling is not to much use. As such I
have during several years stuck to ext2 for those backups.

I would not call it a show-stopper, I will still have some older
Slackware installations capable of reading my backups, but it would be a
major disadvantage if the kernel in upcoming Slackware 15 totally crashes
when trying to read such a backup.

regards Henrik

On 05.08.2021 at 08:57, Henrik Carlqvist scribbled:

> On Thu, 05 Aug 2021 00:08:31 +1000, noel wrote:
> > Is there any reason youve stuck to ext2?
>
> I was not the original poster, but still I might give some such
> reasons even though I have not tried Slackware-current and suffered
> any problems with ext2.
>
> Ext2 as opposed to ext3 and ext4 does not have journaling. Usually
> journaling is a good thing and I use ext4 for my everyday use.
> However, when I do backups to hard drives which are intended for
> "write once, maybe read a few times" that journaling is not to much
> use. As such I have during several years stuck to ext2 for those
> backups.
>
> I would not call it a show-stopper, I will still have some older
> Slackware installations capable of reading my backups, but it would
> be a major disadvantage if the kernel in upcoming Slackware 15
> totally crashes when trying to read such a backup.

The ext4 driver in the kernel is perfectly capable of handling ext2 and
ext3, and is now the preferred driver for those two filesystems, even.
The old driver is still available too, but it's deprecated.

--
With respect,
= Aragorn =

On 08/05/2021 01:57 AM, Henrik Carlqvist wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Aug 2021 00:08:31 +1000, noel wrote:
>> Is there any reason youve stuck to ext2?
>
> I was not the original poster, but still I might give some such reasons
> even though I have not tried Slackware-current and suffered any problems
> with ext2.
>
> Ext2 as opposed to ext3 and ext4 does not have journaling. Usually
> journaling is a good thing and I use ext4 for my everyday use. However,
> when I do backups to hard drives which are intended for "write once,
> maybe read a few times" that journaling is not to much use. As such I
> have during several years stuck to ext2 for those backups.
>
> I would not call it a show-stopper, I will still have some older
> Slackware installations capable of reading my backups, but it would be a
> major disadvantage if the kernel in upcoming Slackware 15 totally crashes
> when trying to read such a backup.
>
> regards Henrik

ext4 is working great with the new kernels, quiet snappy and ext4 is
totally backwards compatible with ext2, what I would suggest is at the
first signs of trouble to go to /etc/fstab and change ext2 to ext4 and
everything will be the same, meta data and all.
--
Jimmy Johnson

Alien Core Linux - AMD A8-7600 - EXT4 at sda12
Registered Linux User #380263

On Tue, 3 Aug 2021 04:12:40 -0000 (UTC),
John Forkosh <forkosh@panix.com> wrote:
> noel <deletethis@invalid.lan> wrote:
> > Robert Komar wrote:
> >> ...I have not been able to boot the system. It panics as it
> >> is loading the initrd. It's hard to know [why] because I
> >> can't scroll back up to the start of the panic log, as others
> >> have also pointed out. Rob Komar
> >
> > had a boot issue once on a pentium, if I had scroll back I'd
> > see the obvious error and correct it, but no scrollback meant
> > hours and hours and hours of hair pulling - eventually grabbed
> > a video camera and recorded the boot up, replayed the
> > recording and saw the error, fixes in 15 seconds
>
> What a great idea. I've had an ongoing similar problem, but it
> never occurred to me to record the screen "offline" (so to
> speak). You think that'll work using a smartphone video
> (actually, I guess I'll be trying it regardless)?

Some 20 years ago I used a video recorder to capture EKG traces in
a clinical study, rather than try to figure out how to get the
data out of the units. A most practical approach.

I would expect the smartphone video to work okay. Resolution may
not be optimal, but probably good enough. I used my iPhone SE to
record the video from an old VCR as it played on a tv screen. Not
even close to HD ( :), but surprisingly good.

--
Ted Heise <theise@panix.com> West Lafayette, IN, USA

On Wed, 04 Aug 2021 19:03:46 +0100, Chris Elvidge wrote:

> On 04/08/2021 06:30 pm, Jimmy Johnson wrote:
>> On 8/4/21 9:51 AM, Thomas Gibson wrote:
>>
>>> I have Slakware 15.0 running on ext3
>>
>> That's fine with me, but why when slackware 15 is being designed to use
>> btrfs.
>
> Wo says it was designed to use btrfs?
> My Slack15 installation uses ext4.

reiserwas fantastic on raid, unfortunately raid or no raid, it did not
like hard powerfails, dataloss was a huge problem, like ZFS used to

On Wed, 04 Aug 2021 17:57:42 -0700, Jimmy Johnson wrote:

> On 08/04/2021 11:03 AM, Chris Elvidge wrote:
>>> That's fine with me, but why when slackware 15 is being designed to
>>> use btrfs.
>
>> Wo says it was designed to use btrfs?
>
> I said, it's being designed to use btrfs. :)
>
>> My Slack15 installation uses ext4.
>
> And so do I, but when 15 is released it will be installed on btrfs.

If that was teh case though -current would already, long, been using it,
it isnt, last -current fresh install I made was back in December, it
chose ext4.

On Thu, 05 Aug 2021 03:57:00 -0700, Jimmy Johnson wrote:

>
> ext4 is
> totally backwards compatible with ext2,

unless your using a later kernel :)
I have no doubt its nothing that Pat has done, its a patch linus or greg
have authorised.

noel <deletethis@invalid.lan> wrote:
>
> Is there any reason youve stuck to ext2?
>
> I admit it took me until just last year to move from ext3 to ext4, my
> earlier attempts to try ext4 were very many years ago when it was new,
> too new, it was unstable, quotas did not work at all, but its matured
> over the years, I'm running production servers on it and not missed a
> beat.
>

I'm not the OP, but as I said earlier, I'm running slackware on a
netbook from an SD card. I use ext2 to reduce wear on the card.
If I upgraded to ext4, I would want to disable journalling and
any other feature that does a lot of extra writing to the device.
I'm not sure if that is possible, and it wasn't necessary until
the latest kernel upgrade.

Cheers,
Rob Komar

On 05/08/2021 04:15 pm, Robert Komar wrote:
> noel <deletethis@invalid.lan> wrote:
>>
>> Is there any reason youve stuck to ext2?
>>
>> I admit it took me until just last year to move from ext3 to ext4, my
>> earlier attempts to try ext4 were very many years ago when it was new,
>> too new, it was unstable, quotas did not work at all, but its matured
>> over the years, I'm running production servers on it and not missed a
>> beat.
>>
>
> I'm not the OP, but as I said earlier, I'm running slackware on a
> netbook from an SD card. I use ext2 to reduce wear on the card.
> If I upgraded to ext4, I would want to disable journalling and
> any other feature that does a lot of extra writing to the device.
> I'm not sure if that is possible, and it wasn't necessary until
> the latest kernel upgrade.
>
> Cheers,
> Rob Komar
>

https://foxutech.com/how-to-disable-enable-journaling/ for example?

i.e. use -O ^has_journal

--
Chris Elvidge
England

noel <deletethis@invalid.lan> wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Aug 2021 11:25:10 -0400, Robert Komar wrote:
>
>> Ralph Spitzner <rasp@spitzner.org> wrote:
>>> noel wrote on 8/2/21 4:36 PM:
>>> [...]
>>>> as for not scrolling back, you have that dumbfuck so called genius
>>>> torvalds to thank for that. had a boot issue once on a pentium, if I
>>>> had scrol back I'd see the obvious error and correct it, but no
>>>> scrollback
>>>
>>> [...]
>>> I imagine it's a bit hard to do screen scrolling when the keyboard and
>>> video drivers (and all others) are dead/ haltet.
>>> would you prefer a windows like:
>>> KERNEL PANIC ERROR #DEADBEEF ?
>>>
>>> -rasp
>>
>> I think most of us would prefer the scrolling that was there for almost
>> thirty years. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than nothing.
>>
>> Back to the original topic, I have slackware-current running in a VM as
>> well. The root filesystem is not ext2, so I can boot without the
>> initrd. In there, I can create an ext2 filesystem in a file, mount
>> that, write to it, read from it,... So, it looks like ext2 works fine
>> in that system. Perhaps my problem on the netbook is really with the
>> initrd as I first thought, and the OP has something broken in his
>> system. I can't duplicate his ext2 problems within the VM.
>>
>> Rob Komar
>
> current kernels dont like ext2, plain and simple
>
> I pulled an ol toshiba usb drive out from storage since I knew it was
> ext2, nope, stack errors and killed at every first attempt...
>
> converted it to ext4,
>
> tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index,has_journal /dev/sdf1
>
> and voila! no errors, so its just ext2 theyve rooted up
>
> way to go linus...
>
> (im not gonna sift through 10K trolls on LKML to see if its been brought
> up there yet.)
>
> (I didnt see mr spitzers post, I didnt miss anything, my troll filters
> seem to be working well)

Thanks for the tune2fs tip. It was a bit more work for me, though, so
I thought I'd give an update here in case it helps anyone.

Besides modifying the root filesystem with tune2fs (but with
^has_journal to disable journaling), I modified /etc/fstab to change the
root file system type from ext2 to ext4. I also added the "noatime"
option to reduce writing on the SD card. I had to modify my mkinitrd
script to remove the "-f ext2" option I was using. I also had to modify
the /etc/lilo.conf file and add "rootfstype=ext4" to the "append"
parameter and re-run lilo. Without the last change, the root filesystem
would only be attempted to be mounted as ext2 and would fail because of
unrecognized options. Perhaps autodetection of the filesystem type is
not working properly at that stage, because adding "rootfstype=ext4" to
the kernel boot options seems like it shouldn't be necessary.

The mkinitrd stuff was problematic because it needed the system to be
booted to run. I had to make that change to the script and rebuild the
initrd images before starting to make changes to the root filesystem.
Fortunately I could re-run lilo on the SD card from my desktop, so I was
able to fix that even when the system would not boot.

Cheers,
Rob Komar

with <slrnsg54u9.ue2.whynot@orphan.zombinet> Eric Pozharski wrote:
> with <nsk7thx7j5.ln2@thomasg.chromat> Thomas Gibson wrote:
>> Is anybody else having problems reading ext2 file drives with latest
>> kernel 5.13? All OK with kernel 5.12.
> 5.13.2 is fine too. Complained about year 2038 though. Also, might
> be relevant, no trigger happy helpers here.

Upgraded to 5.14.9 -- still nothing, ext2 mounts fine (granted no
helpers). Thus whatever it was is either fixed or isn't ext2 problem
per se.

*CUT*

--
Torvalds' goal for Linux is very simple: World Domination
Stallman's goal for GNU is even simpler: Freedom

On 07/10/2021 10:57, Eric Pozharski wrote:
> with <slrnsg54u9.ue2.whynot@orphan.zombinet> Eric Pozharski wrote:
>> with <nsk7thx7j5.ln2@thomasg.chromat> Thomas Gibson wrote:
>>> Is anybody else having problems reading ext2 file drives with latest
>>> kernel 5.13? All OK with kernel 5.12.
>> 5.13.2 is fine too. Complained about year 2038 though. Also, might
>> be relevant, no trigger happy helpers here.
>
> Upgraded to 5.14.9 -- still nothing, ext2 mounts fine (granted no
> helpers). Thus whatever it was is either fixed or isn't ext2 problem
> per se.
>
> *CUT*
>
I have recently tested ext2 file systems on kernel 5.14.11 and you are
correct, the problem has been corrected.

--
Tom Gibson