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SubjectRe: `filetype' ext2 feature causes dump to SEGV
   Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 23:54:39 +0100 (CET)
From: Stelian Pop <pop@cybercable.fr>

Of course you are absolutelly right, I will integrate the patch in the
upcoming release (0.4b10, planned for this week-end).

Great! While you're at it, you might also want have dump check the
filesystem feature flags (look at e2fsck to see how it does it), so that
dump won't try to touch a filesystem that it might not be prepared to
deal with.

By the way, Ted: I plan to reimplement the ext2fs access code in dump
(actually the entire traverse.c code), in order to make dump more
filesystem independent (to be able to add in the future some support for
other filesystems, such as ext3, BSD, etc). I was wondering why dump uses
direct disc access (open and read directly the direct, indirect and doubly
indirect blocks), instead of using the associated e2fsprogs library
functions.
Did Rimy done this because the functions didn't exist at this time or was
this for performance reasons ?

Actually, it was Stephen Tweedie who originally did the dump port, and
the reason for why it was done that way was precisely because it was a
port of the BSD dump program, which originally only supported exactly
one filesystem -- the BSD UFS. Since the BSD UFS didn't have an ext2
lbirary functions, it accessed the direct, indirect blocks directly;
Stephen just simply used the ext2 library to read the inode table, but
didn't otherwise try to make major changes to the dump program.

If you want to make dump use more of the ext2 library's features, that's
probably a good thing. I would very strongly encourage you to keep the
on-tape format compatible with the BSD dump program, however. Being
able to exchange dump tape between BSD and Linux can be a very handy
feature from time to time.

- Ted

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