linux-kernel - Re: [GIT PULL] Ext3 removal, quota & udf fixes

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Date:	Wed, 2 Sep 2015 09:33:26 -0400
From:	Austin S Hemmelgarn <ahferroin7@...il.com>
To:	Chuck Ebbert <cebbert.lkml@...il.com>
Cc:	Albino B Neto <bino@...eup.net>,
	Raymond Jennings <shentino@...il.com>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>, LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org" <linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org>,
	linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] Ext3 removal, quota & udf fixes

On 2015-09-02 07:58, Chuck Ebbert wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 15:39:45 -0400
> Austin S Hemmelgarn <ahferroin7@...il.com> wrote:
>
>> On 2015-09-01 06:29, Albino B Neto wrote:
>>> 2015-08-31 19:31 GMT-03:00 Raymond Jennings <shentino@...il.com>:
>>>> I think also that we should remove the ext2 driver before we remove the ext3
>>>> driver.
>>>
>>> Yes. It is logical to remove the old ext2 drive, because there are
>>> more computers with ext3 that ext2. Ext2 is obsolete by existing
>>> technologies.
>>>
>> NO, it is not logical.  A vast majority of Android smartphones in the
>> wild use ext2, as do a very significant portion of embedded systems that
>> don't have room for the few hundred kilobytes of extra code that the
>> ext4 driver has in comparison to ext2.
>
> Would it be possible to discard the code used for ext4 and ext3
> features at module init time? So you could do something like:
>
>    modprobe ext4 no_ext4 no_ext3
>
> and all the space used by those functions would be freed and the
> filesystem driver would mark all the ext3/ext4 features as
> unsupported.
>
Personally, I think this is a great idea.  It would allow people who 
need the low memory usage to transition over to the ext4 driver while 
keeping the memory usage low.  In such a case, I would almost suggest 
making an alias for the ext4 module (extfs maybe?) as modprobe ext4 
no_ext4 has the potential to significantly confuse people.


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