Ext3 users - Aug 2001 - About Names

Hello all,

I've been using ext3 since it was released for 2.2 kernel, and I've
always wondered about the name.

Calling it 'ext3' implies that it's a brand-new filesystem, not just
a
journalling add-on for ext2.  I guess I understand that you want to be
able to use ext3 and ext2 in the same kernel, but why not make it a
mount option, since the journal code is separate in the kernel anyway?

Maybe it's not important, but it seems like a bad idea to imply that
ext3 is different from ext2 like ext2 is different from extfs.

-- 
     -Matt Stegman

Hi,

On Fri, Aug 03, 2001 at 10:05:27AM -0500, Matt Stegman wrote:
> I've been using ext3 since it was released for 2.2 kernel, and I've
> always wondered about the name.
> 
> Calling it 'ext3' implies that it's a brand-new filesystem, not
just a
> journalling add-on for ext2.  I guess I understand that you want to be
> able to use ext3 and ext2 in the same kernel, but why not make it a
> mount option, since the journal code is separate in the kernel anyway?
The ext3 code is quite different from the ext2 code in many places.
The journaling itself is done in a separate layer but ext2 had to be
changed quite significantly to allow it to use that journaling code. 

The changes are significant enough that in order to prevent any
possibility of destabilising the existing ext2 filesystem, it really
does make sense to keep ext3 separate.

Cheers,
 Stephen