[Clfs-dev] E2fsprogs 4.2.10

[William Harrington]

Greetings,

We need to look at this carefully and see if we want to upgrade to  
4.2.10 from 4.2.9 in our package freeze.

http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/e2fsprogs-release.html#1.42.10

E2fsprogs 1.42.10 (May 18, 2014)
Mke2fs now creates file systems in regular files (which is very often  
used when maintaining virtual machine images) without requiring the  
user to use the force option. In addition, the mke2fs output has been  
made much less verbose and only displays information that users will  
be more likely to find useful by default.

Mke2fs now will ask the user to confirm that they want to continue  
before wiping out a pre-existing file system, partition table, or LVM  
physical volume.

Mke2fs now has the ability to create file systems where all the  
metadata is located at the very beginning of the device. This can be  
useful for flash devices which have SLC flash at the beginning of the  
disk, for FAT compatibility, for example. As part of this, mke2fs and  
tune2fs can control the location of the data blocks used by the  
journal inode. In addition, the new sparse_super2 feature allows for  
even fewer (anywhere from zero to two) backup superblocks.

Mke2fs now uses much less CPU when allocating the blocks used for very  
large file systems.

Mke2fs can now support creating a file system at an offset. This can  
be useful when creating a disk image for virtual machines (Addresses  
Debian Bug: #497984)

Previously, e2fsck had a number of very serious bugs when checking a  
file system wich used the new the quota file system option (where the  
quota inodes were stored in hidden inodes) and the quota inode was  
inconsistent with the actual usage data. This problem was documented  
in https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Quota. These problems have  
been fixed in 1.42.10, so the quota should be safe to use with  
e2fsprogs 1.42.10.

Fixed in a bug in resize2fs which could cause shrink operation fail in  
the unlikely situation when the inode table needs to be moved to a  
location before the current location.

Resize2fs now has a much more accurate (and less conservative)  
estimation of how far the file system can be shrunk. This allows a  
mostly empty filesystem which is a few terabytes, to be shrunk to a  
few megabytes in a single resize2fs -M operation.

E2fsck will now force a full file system check if there are any file  
system inconsistencies detected in the super block.

The filefrag program will now display hte shared extent flag, which is  
used by file systems such as btrfs.

If the number of inodes in the file systems is larger than the time  
that file sytem was created (as measured by the number of seconds  
since January 1, 1970) e2fsck would print a scary (but otherwise  
harmless) warning of file system corruption for each inode in the  
orphan list. This false positive has been fixed.

The e4defrag program has been fixed so it will no longer refuse with  
filesystem with the 64-bit or the bigalloc feature enabled.

The logsave progam will print a much less scary message which could  
lead users to believe something has gone very wrong with e2fsck exits  
with a non-zero exit status (since this is normal after e2fsck has  
automatically fixed a file system corruption during a preen  
operation). (Addresses Debian Bug: #468821)

When creating a file system which is larger than 16TB, the  
resize_inode option must be disabled -- since the resize_inode simply  
doesn't support reserving metadata block numbers which is larger than  
32 bits. The mke2fs program does this automatically if the file system  
size is determined automatically. It will now also do this if the file  
size is specified explicitly.

Fixed bugs associated with resize2fs and shrinking bigalloc file  
systems.

The e2fsck program will no longer try to add a UUID on a mounted file  
system with checksums enabled, since this could leave the file system  
checksums broken.

Tune2fs will allow the removal of an external journal from file system  
which is marked as needing the journal replayed when the force ("-f")  
option is given twice. (Addresses Debian Bug: #559301)

Tune2fs will no longer support enabling sparse_super if the meta_bg  
file system feature is enabled, since it could result in data loss. In  
practice, all modern file systems have sparse_super is enabled, so  
it's not worth trying to change how tune2fs handles enabling the  
sparse_super feature.

Fixed support for 1k block file systems with the meta_bg feature.

When the superblock is corrupt, e2fsck can't figure out the location  
of the alternate superblock. Unfortunately, the routine that  
calculates the location of the alternate superblock uses 8193 if it  
can't figure this out, so the message printed by e2fsck always  
suggests using "e2fsck -b 8193". This message has been fixed to  
suggest both the superblock location of 8193 and and 32768. (Addresses  
Debian Bug: #719185)

The lookback mount detection code that was introduced in 1.42.9 wasn't  
actually compiled in due to an autoconf oops, so it's fixed now in  
1.42.10. (Addresses Debian Bug: #497984)

A bug introduced in 1.42.9 would cause debugfs to print two error  
messages if it found an error while parsing a user-supplied block  
number. This has been fixed in 1.42.10.

Update Czech, Dutch, French, German, Polish, Spanish, Sweedish, and  
Vietnamese translations. (Addresses Debian Bug: #703048)

Updated/fixed various man pages. (Addresses Debian Bugs: #719189,  
#719184)

Fixed various Debian Packaging Issues. (Addresses Debian Bug: #718725)



Programmer's Notes
Fixed a lot of coverity, sparce gcc -Wall, and clang warnings/nits.

Allow the location of pkg-config files to be specified independent of  
the libdir location via a makefile variable.

Fixed parse-types.sh not to complain when cross-compiling and the  
sizes of types are different between the target architecture and the  
architecture of the build system

Allow the regression test suite to work correctly on systems which do  
not have the "truncate" or "mksawp" programs.

Allow e2fsck to build correctly on systems (such as Android) that do  
not have the signal.h file.

E2fsprogs now has code coverage testing which can be enbled using  
"configure --enable-gcov".

The libe2p.h header file can now be used included by C++ programs.

The profile/config file used by e2fsck and mke2fs will interpret  
numbers with a leading 0 character to mean that they should be  
interpreted as an octal integer.

The extent handling functions in libext2fs have been improved so they  
have proper rollback when there is an error splitting an extent. Also  
fix a number of bugs when punching holes in files, and fix an off-by- 
one bug when inserting an extent into an empty inode.

The libext2fs library now handles the support of BLOCK_UNINIT by  
clearing the portion of block bitmap when it is loaded, instead of  
when it is used. This reduces the chances of bugs, and and simplifies  
the code. It also means that debugfs will properly show that blocks in  
uninitialized block groups as being unused when using the testb command.

The e4defrag program will try to use fadvise64 or posix_fadvise64() if  
it is present, which allows 64-bit offsets on 32-bit systems.



Sincerely,



William Harrington