xref: /aosp_15_r20/external/e2fsprogs/doc/RelNotes/v1.19.txt (revision 6a54128f25917bfc36a8a6e9d722c04a0b4641b6)

E2fsprogs 1.19 (July 13, 2000)
==============================

Release the resize2fs program since the timeout before it could
be released under the GPL has finally expired.

Add experimental support needed for the ext2 compression patches.
This requires compiling e2fsprogs with the --enable-compression flag
to the configure script.

Added ext3 journalling support.  E2fsck will run the journal (if
necessary) by temporarily mounting the filesystem.  /sbin/fsck.ext3 is
installed as a symlink to e2fsck.  Fsck has been taught about ext3,
and treats it the same as ext2 in terms of the progress bar logic.
Dumpe2fs will display the superblock journalling information if the
filesystem has a journal.  The ext2 library will now permit opening an
ext3 filesystem with the recovery flag set.  This is necessary for
on-line dump's to work correctly, but there may be issues with this
working well since ext3 is much less aggressive about syncing blocks to
the filesystem, since they're safe on the journal.

Tune2fs and e2fsck have been changed to allow the mount_count check to
be disabled by setting max_mount_count to -1.  (This was already
supported by the kernel.)

Create a symbolic link for fsck.ext3, since the e2fsprogs utilities
are used for ext3 as well.

Added internationalization support for e2fsprogs; must be enabled
by passing --enable-nls to configure.

Always use the provided ext2fs header files to insulate ourselves from
kernel version changes.  Which include files are used by e2fsprogs
have also been cleaned up to improve portability.

Limit the number of times that e2fsck updates the progress bar so that
people who are booting using a 9600 baud console don't get swamped by
too many updates.

Improved the loop detection algorithm in e2sck's pass #3 so that it is
much, much faster for large filesystems with a large number of
directories.

The memory footprint for e2fsck is now slightly smaller than before.

E2fsck now checks if special devices have a non-zero size, and offers
to clear the size field if it finds such an inode.

E2fsck now checks if special devices have the append-only flag set,
and offers to clear the inode.

E2fsck now properly handles some "should never fail" cases during a
bitmap copy in pass5.

E2fsck now properly prints control characters in filenames as ^A .. ^Z.

E2fsck now calculates the correct location of the backup superblock in
the case of filesystem blocksizes > 1k.

Fixed a bug in e2fsck's calculation of the number of inodes_per_block
which normally didn't cause problems under most filesystem parameters,
but could cause a valid superblock to be rejected in extreme cases.
Other checks for validating superblock values were made more
stringent.

Added non-destructive write testing to the badblocks program, courtesy
of David Beattie.  The badblocks also now has an option to input the
current set of bad blocks, so that known bad blocks are skipped to
speed up the badblocks test.  There is also a persistent rescan
feature which causes badblocks to run until it has completed some
number of passes without discovering any new bad blocks.

Badblocks now checks to see if the device is mounted and refuses to do
the tests involving writing to the device if it is mounted.  Also,
badblocks now allows the number of blocks to be checked to be
defaulted to the size of the partition.

Fixed a bug in fsck which didn't allow non-root users to be able to
check filesystems if there were any LABEL= or UUID= entries in
/etc/fstab.

The Hurd doesn't support the filetype filesystem feature.  The mke2fs
program now makes sure that for the Hurd, the filetype feature is
turned off.  E2fsck will check to see if the filetype feature is
turned on for Hurd filesystems, and offer to turn off the feature.

Mke2fs now has a safety check to make sure the number of blocks do not
exceed 32 bits even on a 64 bit platform.

Really fixed a bug in fsck to allow "fsck -As" to run interactive
fsck's.  (For those people who like to do interactive fsck's in the
/etc/rc scripts!?!)

Debugfs has a few new features: the rdump command, which will do a
recursive dump of a directory and all of its contents, and the lcd
command which does a local chdir (much like the ftp command of the
same name).  In addition, the debugfs program and the open_filesystem
command now takes three new options: -b and -s, which allows the
blocksize and superblock location to be specified, and the -c option
which is used in catastrophic situations where the block group
descriptors are corrupt.  If the -c option is specified, debugfs will
skip trying to read in the block and inode bitmaps.

Debugfs's lsdel command was fixed to handle bad blocks in the inode
table.

A Y2K bug in debugfs's "ls -l" handling was fixed by switching to use
4 digit years.

General improvements in error messages

  - Mke2fs prints a sane error message if the partition size is zero
	(usually because the partition table wasn't reread by the
	kernel due to the partition being busy), instead of "invalid
	argument passed to ext2 library while initializing superblock".

  - Fsck now prints more self-explanatory message if an invalid UUID=
	or LABEL= specification is passed to it.

UUID library changed to use the LGPL.

Fixed a bug in the UUID library where very rapid calls to the
time-based UUID generator could cause duplicate UUID's to be returned.
This was not a problem for e2fsprogs, but it could be a problem for
other users of the library.

Make the UUID library more robust in the face of missing or an
improper /dev/urandom or /dev/random files.

Added some random portability fixes for Solaris.

Some minor man page updates.

Fixed a memory leak in the ss library.


Programmer's notes:
-------------------

We now try to use lseek64 and open64 from the LFS if possible.

The 3rd parameter in e2p's print_flags is now a flags word, instead of
a boolean option.

The mark and unmark bitmap functions now return the previous state of
the bit that was being changed, which is useful for some speed
optimizations.

The following functions have been added to enhance the badblocks list
handling in libext2fs: ext2fs_write_bb_FILE, ext2fs_read_bb_FILE2, and
ext2fs_badblocks_equal.

The ext2 header files now have the latest journalling fields to the
superblock.

The ext2fs_mkdir function in libext2fs now properly backs out of error
conditions robustly.

Cleaned up makefiles:
  - to cleanly  compile with the -j flag.
  - so distclean removes all generated files.
  - so in case of an error while installing header files, the make aborts.

Fix test_script so that it works correctly when compiling in the
source directory.

The random UUID generation routine has been made slightly better in
the case where /dev/random doesn't exist.  (Use of randomly-based UUID
is still not recommended if /dev/random doesn't exist, however; it's
better to use the time/ethernet MAC address UUID in this case.)

Clean up the build process so it's more friendly in case of missing
directories.

The ext2fs header file can now be #include'd into C++ programs.

The e2p.h header file is now installed.

Added workaround to a gawk 3.0.5 bug in lib/ss/mk_cmds.