E2fsprogs Changelog

What's new in E2fsprogs 1.45.3

Jul 23, 2019
  • UI and Features:
  • Whether or not automatic online scrubs will be run is now controlled by a setting in /etc/e2scrub.conf. To enable automatic online scrubs, uncomment out the line containing "periodic_e2scrub=1".
  • The fuse2fs program is now installed in /usr/bin instead of /usr/sbin, since it does not require root privileges.
  • Fuse2fs now works with if fusermount from FUSE V3 is installed. However, in order to provide this compatibility, if you are using a fusermount from FUSE v2, and you want to mount on top of a non-empty directory, you will need to specify -o nonempty explicitly. FUSE V3 always allows mounting on top of non-empty directories, and will fail if the user or fuse2fs passes the nonempty option.
  • Fixes:
  • Fixed a bug which caused e2fsck to improperly handle file systems that enabled both the large_dir and inline directories at the same time.
  • E2scrub_all now correctly handles an encrypted (LUKS) ext[234] file system stacked on top of an LVM volume. (Addresses Debian Bug: #931387)
  • Fixed a bug in "E2scrub_all -r" where it was incorrectly specifying which volume needed to have its e2scrub snapshot cleaned up. (Addresses Debian Bug: #931679)
  • Fixed the Czech, Dutch, German, and Vietnamese translations which improperly used positional markers which broke a few translated e2fsck problem descriptions. (Addresses Debian Bug: #892173)
  • Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.:
  • Fixed various debian packaging issues. (Addresses Debian Bug: #931266, #923372)
  • Fixed error checking for calls to posix_{memalign,fadvise}.
  • Add regression test for checking a file system using fs-verity.
  • Various regression test cleanups.
  • Fixed various compiler warnings.
  • Added xgettext markers to fix incorrectly marked strings in the e2fsprogs translations template file as being c-style printf strings when in fact they aren't.
  • Added utility script which generates the release tarfile using git archive.
  • Update the Czech, Dutch, and Portuguese translations from the Translation Project.

New in E2fsprogs 1.45.2 (May 28, 2019)

  • Fixes:
  • Fixed various problems with how e2scrub_all is run from cron, when not all of the required packages are installed, or there are no LVM devices on the system. (Addresses Debian Bug: #929186, #929287, #928977)
  • When mke2fs asks the user if she should proceed, fall back to the English 'y' or 'Y' characters since there could be a missing translation prompting the use of the English 'y' character. (Addresses Debian Bug: #907034)
  • Fix spurious complaint of blocks beyond i_size for verity files.
  • Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.:
  • Fixed various debian packaging issues.
  • Fixed "make install" failure when the cron.d directory does not exist.
  • Update the Czech, Malay, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukarainian translations. Add the new Portuguese translation.

New in E2fsprogs 1.44.5 (Dec 17, 2018)

  • UI and Features:
  • When e2fsck notices it could optimize an extent tree, it will now ask "Optimize?" instead of "Fix?", which was confusing some users since it implied that something was broken.
  • Fixes:
  • Use 64-bit counters to track the number of files that are defragmented using in e4defrag, to avoid overflows when more than 2**32 files are defragmented. (Addresses Debian Bug: #888899)
  • Correctly translate Posix ACL's. This was a regression introduced in v1.44.4. (Addresses Launchpad Bug: #1807288)
  • Use the online free block counts so e2freefrag's percentages are correct.
  • Fix a false warning that tune2fs will take long time to change a UUID if the metadata_csum feature is not enabled.
  • E2fsck will only offer to set the inline_data feature flag when the inline flag is set on the inode, *and* the system.data xattr is present.
  • E4defrag will handle the case where it is running as root and it can't find the file system to open more gracefully. (Addresses Debian Bug: #907634)
  • Fix a bug where resize2fs was failing to update the extent tree checksums in an corner case. (Addresses Launchpad Bug: #1798562)
  • Fix fuse2fs's command line parsing when options are specified after the target device/image.
  • Fix a bug which could cause e2fsprogs tools to segfault on a corrupted file system where the journal's s_nr_users is impossibly large.
  • E2image now includes the mmp block (if needed) when creating a metadata-only image.
  • Fix various Verity handling bugs which made it completely unusable in e2fsprogs 1.44.4.
  • Fox a bug in tune2fs where it would dereference of freed memory after replaying the journal.
  • Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.:
  • Synchronized changes from Android's AOSP e2fsprogs tree.
  • Fix groff formatting nits in various man pages. (Addresses Debian Bug: #916188)
  • Fixed various debian packaging issues (Addresses Debian Bug: #915942)
  • Adjusted the copyright license for lib/blkid/version.c to be LGPL (and consistent with the rest of files in that directory).
  • Fix various clang warnings.
  • Fix "make install" when configure was run with --enable-subset.
  • Make sure the regression tests clean up their tmpfile if the test script exits.
  • Fix build failures on non-glibc systems.

New in E2fsprogs 1.44.4 (Aug 20, 2018)

  • UI and Features:
  • Add basic support for the ext4 verity feature (aka fsverity). It is a read-only compatibility feature which uses Merkle trees to add functionality much like dm-verity on a per-file basis. For this release we simply allow e2fsck to accept file systems with the verity feature enable (no special handling is needed) and mke2fs to create file systems with the verity feature.
  • Fixes:
  • E2fsck will now properly repair a file system that has both the resize_inode and meta_bg features enabled simultaneously (which is never supposed to happen, but it could happen in versions of mke2fs before 1.44.3 when it was given parameters where more than 75% of the block group was used for group descriptor tables).
  • Avoid a floating point exception crash when libblkid tries probing a maliciously corrupted HFS+ superblock.
  • Debugfs's ncheck command now properly will handle inodes that have multiple hard links.
  • On platforms that don't supply strdup, the replacement function for strdup() had a bug which would cause it to crash if it was used. (Fortunately this only happens if the [scratch_files] feature in e2fsck is used.)
  • Fixed support for devices which have non-512 byte block sizes on Apple Darwin.
  • E2fsprogs 1.44.3 would fail to compile on very old versions of gcc. This is now fixed.
  • Update and clarify man pages. (Addresses Debian Bug: #757831)
  • Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
  • Synchronized changes from Android's AOSP e2fsprogs tree.
  • Instead of building the subset e2fsprogs-libs tar file, add a new configure option, --enable-subset. This along with other changes (such as dropping obsolete files that aren't shipped as part of e2fsprogs-X.YY.tar.gz) allows us to be able to build the tarball using the "git archive" command.
  • Fixed various debian packaging issues (Addresses Debian Bug: #905195)
  • Update Danish, Spanish, and Swedish translations.

New in E2fsprogs 1.44.3 (Jul 10, 2018)

  • UI and Features:
  • The debugfs inode_dump command can now print a hex dump of the i_block array and the extra space in the inode, as a convenience to someone investigating a corrupted inode.
  • The debugfs block_dump and inode_dump command can now print low-level dump of extended attribute data structures in the block or inode.
  • The dumpe2fs command can now print out information in the Multi-Mount Protection (MMP) block. This is also available as e2mmpstatus command for compatibility with the Lustre utilities.
  • The debugfs command can now operate on some file systems with corrupted superblocks so they can be fixed. This includes file systems with a corrupted inodes count field and file systems where not all of the allocation bitmaps have valid locations or are not readable.
  • Fixes:
  • The inode's project ID is now properly byte-swapped on big-endian systems.
  • E2fsprogs now ignores s_desc_size for file systems that do not have the 64-bit feature set. This makes it more consistent with the kernel, so it can now operate on file systems that the kernel is willing to mount.
  • E2fsck now considers device inodes with the extents flag as corrupt and offer to clear them.
  • E2fsck more properly handles cases where s_inodes_count is corrupted.
  • E2fsck no longer spews large number of errors when the superblock badly corrupted (restoring its behavior pre-1.43).
  • E2fsck will now offer to set the dir_nlink feature if it is not set and file system requires the dir_nlink feature because there are too many subdirectories in a directory.
  • E2fsck will no longer loop infinitely due to a maliciously crafted file system which has a fully uninitialized inode table in the first block group.
  • E2fsck will no longer hang if the last block in the file system is a fixed-metadata block. (Very rare, but could happen.)
  • E2fsck no longer allows initialized blocks to exist past i_size. This is something the Linux implementation of ext4 has never done (and should never do).
  • While replaying the journal in e2fsck, certain errors would previously cause e2fsck to print a non-sensical error message (e.g., "Unknown code ____ 251 while recovering journal"). This has been fixed.
  • In cases where more than 75% of the block group will be used for group descriptor table, mke2fs would previously create an invalid file system with both the meta_bg and resize_inode features enabled. It will now disable the resize_inode feature.
  • The mke2fs program now properly creates a file system which is exactly 1

New in E2fsprogs 1.44.1 (Mar 26, 2018)

  • Fixes:
  • E2fsprogs 1.44.0 introduced a regression introduced which caused e2fsck to fail to support HTree directories on big-endian systems. Fix how we read block numbers for internal htree nodes.
  • Removed a potential memory leak from fsck.
  • E2image now correctly creates e2image files for bigalloc file systems.
  • Dumpe2fs and debugfs now correctly support e2image files for file systems that have the meta_bg option enabled.
  • E2fsck and debugfs now correctly handle delete inodes (including processing the orphaned inode list in the case of e2fsck) for bigalloc file systems. (Addresses Google Bug: #73795618)
  • Portability fixes for GNU Hurd. (Addresses Debian Bug: #893590)
  • Portability fixes for building in some cross-build environments.
  • Portability fixes for MacOS 10.6.8.
  • Add clarifications to chattr's man page. (Addresses Debian Bug: #890390)
  • Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.:
  • Debugfs now reads allocation bitmaps much more efficiently when opening a file system.
  • Update Sweedish translation file.
  • Add Vcs-* fields to debian packaging. (Addresses Debian Bug: #887512)
  • Fix some test failures on GNU Hurd caused by a different default block size.
  • Add new regression tests.

New in E2fsprogs 1.43.9 (Feb 12, 2018)

  • Remove the huge file flag from libe2p (and hence from chattr/lsattr), since it was never made visible by the kernel. Remove the description of some compression related flags, and add a description of the encrypted file flag, and the project hierarchy flag.
  • Remove a misplaced "MNP is unsupported" message from debugfs.
  • Fix a build failure in lib/ext2fs/swapfs.c on big-endian systems. (Addresses Debian Bug #886119)
  • Fix various Debian packaging issues. (Addresses Debian Bug #269569).

New in E2fsprogs 1.43.6 (Sep 4, 2017)

  • Fix printing of quota inconsistency messages on 32-bit platforms in e2fsck. Also fix a bug which cause project quota problems to be labelled as group quota problems.
  • Fix UI problems caused by fuzzy translations such that some messages are in English and some are in the foreign language, and it's not obvious to user how to answer yes/no questions. (Addresses Debian Bug: #856586).
  • Fix some out-of-bounds memory accesses in e2fsck caused by (usually maliciously) corrupted file systems. (Addresses Debian Bugs: #871539, #871540)
  • Optimize CPU usage in e2fsck for very large, very fragmented sparse files.
  • Add an optional mode in e2fsck which trades off additional memory for CPU time when processing file systems that are heavily hard-linked. (This can be a very large amount of memory, so this feature is disabled for now. How to automatically determine when it would be helpful to enable this optimization, and when it is _safe_ to enable this optimization is still a bit of a research problem.)
  • The mke2fs program will automatically upsize the inode size to 256 if it is not explicitly specified on command-line and the default inode size is not large enough to support the project quota feature requested by the user. If the inode size is explicitly specified to be 128 bytes, and the project quota is enabled mke2fs will fail since with an error explaining that project id's can't be supported when the inode size is < 256 bytes.
  • The tune2fs program will not allow the project feature or project quotas to be enabled in the inode size is 128 bytes.
  • The tune2fs progam now prints a more understandable message explaining that the file system needs to be checked using e2fsck -f before running certain complex tune2fs operations. (Addresses Debian Bug: #857336)
  • If the proceed_delay option is enabled in /etc/e2fsck.conf, the message indicating that user can wait N seconds to proceed was ambiguous. That message has been made more clear. (Addresses Debian Bug: #857336)
  • Fix LFS bug which caused e2image to fail to create regular e2image files which are larger than 2 GiB on 32-bit platforms. (Addresses Debian Bug: #855246)
  • Fix FreeBSD portability problem caused by the fact that they no longer use block devices. (Disks are character mode devices.)
  • Update the Czech, French, Polish, Swedish, and Vietnamese translations.
  • Fixed various Debian Packaging Issues.

New in E2fsprogs 1.43.1 (Jun 9, 2016)

  • Fixed e2fsck so that it would correctly update the project quota usage when deleting a corrupted and inode, and fixed mke2fs so it wouldn't dereference memory beyond the small inode structure (which was wrong, but worked mostly by accident unless hardening or some security malloc was in use).
  • Fixed a large number of FreeBSD portability problems. (To build on FreeBSD, however, we still need to use GNU Make and redirect dd to use GNU dd.)
  • The configure script now supports --enable-hardening, which enables stack protection, fortify, read-only relocation tables, immediate dynamic symbol binding, and text segment ASLR (if the kernel has userspace ASLR support enabled) by enabling position independent executable code. (Distributions who want to do their own special thing can set CFLAGS, CFLAGS_SHLIB, CLFAGS_STLIB, LDFLAGS, LDFLAGS_SHLIB and LDFLAGS_STATIC as appropriate.)
  • The configure script now supports --disable-tdb since on 64-bit systems, it's much faster to just enable additional swap space. The scratch_files feature in e2fsck.conf is mostly only useful on 32-bit systems.
  • Fixed the Direct I/O fallback codepath in the Unix I/O manager so that read/modify/write worked correctly. Fortunately in practice (with the exception of the Undo handler when running on FreeBSD) used this buggy codepath. so file systems weren't getting corrupted.
  • Mke2fs will now warn if the user provides a label which is too long. (Addresses Debian Bug: #791630)
  • Debugfs's rdump command now works correctly when dumping the root directory of a file system. (Addresses Debian Bug: #766125)
  • Fixed a bug in debugfs so it would correctly calculate a block group's checksum field field on 64-bit ssystems.
  • E2fsck now has a much more understandable error message when the journal superblock is corrupt and the user declines to fix it. (Addresses Debian Bug: #768162)
  • Fixed support of extended timestamps on 64-bit systems.
  • Updated/fixed various man pages. (Addresses Debian Bugs: #766379, #761144, #770750, #428361, #766127)
  • Fixed various Debian Packaging Issues. (Addresses Debian Bug: #825868)

New in E2fsprogs 1.43 (May 21, 2016)

  • Add support for the ext4 metadata checksum, checksum seed, inline data, encryption, project quota, and read-only features.
  • Support for the very old, experimental, and never-added-to-mainline compression feature has been removed.
  • Mke2fs will now create file systems with the metadata_csum and 64bit features enabled by default.
  • The mke2fs program will now support multiple -O options (instead of just ignoring all but the last -O option).
  • Mke2fs will now correctly determine the size of a file system and handle the discard operation correctly when the "-E offset=NNN" is used. (Addresses Debian Bug: #803629)
  • The tune2fs program will ask the user for confirmation before starting dangerous operations if the terminal is available, and it will replay the journal if necessary.
  • Add an ext2/3/4 FUSE server
  • Debugfs can now modify extended attributes and journal transactions.
  • Debugfs now can properly display and set extended timestamps.
  • E2fsck will offer to fix extended timestamps that were incorrectly encoded by older kernels.
  • Fix miscellaneous MMP bugs in debugfs.
  • Fix sparse_super2 bugs in mke2fs and resize2fs.
  • Fix or improve offset support in mke2fs, e2undo, and libext2fs.
  • The resize2fs command can now convert file systems between 64-bit and 32-bit mode.
  • Fix potential out-of-bounds memory access in resize2fs when doing a large off-line file system grow operation.
  • We now use a new e2undo file format which is much more efficient and faster than the old tdb-based scheme. Since it so much faster, e2fsck, tune2fs, debugfs, and resize2fs now also can support using creating an undo file.
  • The mke2fs command can now set the error behavior when initializing the file system (so the administrator doesn't have to issue a separate tune2fs -e command).
  • Teach mke2fs to parse a human-readable argument for -i option.
  • Teach mke2fs to automatically handle creating file systems > 500T by automatically enable the meta_bg feature.
  • Mke2fs will now prompt for user verification before rewriting a file system's superblock using the -S option.
  • Mke2fs no longer complains if the user tries to create a file system using the entire block device (e.g., without using a partition). The minor number convention is not used by all block devices, and it's quite normal in some circumstances to create a file system on /dev/sdc instead of /dev/sdc1.
  • Fix an "mke2fs -d" bug which could create inodes with invalid extended attribute blocks
  • E2fsck is now much more paranoid about not freeing or corrupting critical metadata blocks, such as inode table blocks, even if corrupted indirect blocks or extent trees point at these blocks.
  • E2fsck now prints block ranges in pass1b instead of listing all of the blocks exhaustively.
  • E2fsck will try to expand the root directory if the lost+found can't be linked to the root directory. Also, offer to use the root directory if lost+found can't be created.
  • E2fsck is now more paranoid handling corrupted extent trees as well as corrupted journals.
  • E2fsck can now rebuild extent trees, either (a) to optimize them, (b) to recover from a corrupted extent tree, or (c) to convert block-mapped inodes to use extents.
  • E2fsck now has a readahead mechanism which can significantly speed its performance, especially on RAID arrays.
  • E2fsck now has a "yes to all" option which the user can give if she is tired of answering 'y' to a very large number of questions.
  • E2fsck will now ignore the badblocks inode if the contents of the badblocks inode indicate that the portion inode table containing the badblocks inode is bad. (We must go deeper...)
  • E2fsck can now correctly fix directory with holes on bigalloc file systems.
  • E2fsck will now check for extent mapped inodes with no extent header and clear them if found.
  • E2fsck now checks to make sure the extended attribute header doesn't result in the xattr extending beyond the bounds of the inode
  • Fixed a bug in e2fsck to avoid overrunning a buffer containing jbd2 revoke records if the journal is corrupted.
  • Fixed a bug in e2fsck which could cause it loop forever if a special inode has too many invalid block mappings.
  • Fixed a bug in e2fsck which could cause pass1b/c/d processing to get confused if an attempt to allocate a block can't find any free space in the file system.
  • E2fsck will no longer try to force rewrite blocks located beyond the file system.
  • The e2fsck program will no longer update the quota inodes when it is interrupted.
  • Fix a bug which in rare cases would cause e2fsck -fD to corrupt an extent-mapped directory.
  • Fixed a bug in resize2fs which could lead to resize2fs crashing or a corrupted file system if the file system is almost completely full when trying grow a file system and we need to allocate blocks to grow the block group descriptors.
  • Fixed a bug in resize2fs which could cause it to get fooled trying to determinthe the RAID array's stride when flex_bg is enabled.
  • Fix resize2fs bug that could leave block allocation bitmaps uninitialized.
  • The dumpe2fs output has been improved so it is cleaner and always fits within 80 columns. Also added a more easily machine-parsable output of dumpe2fs.
  • The mke2fs program can now pre-populate a file system from a directory hierarchy using the -d option.
  • The mke2fs program now skips zeroing inode table blocks if they were already zeroed using the discard feature.
  • Check to make sure file system features which can not be supported by HURD are not enabled if the file system is created to be HURD-compatible.
  • Added a new e2fuzz command that will fuzz an ext4 image for testing purposes.
  • The debugfs logdump command can now deal with 64-bit revoke tables correctly. Also, "logdump -O" will print the old log contents (before the journal was replayed).
  • The debugfs bmap command can now be used to set or allocate a physical block.
  • Fixed a bug so "filefrag -B -e -v" does not return a separate entry for each block.
  • The filefrag program now accounts for holes in sparse files created by the file punch operation as an expected/optimal mapping.
  • The file I/O functions now correctly handle inodes containing uninitialized blocks.
  • Fix a bug in tune2fs so that removing uninit_bg feature on a bigalloc file system won't result in corrupted block bitmaps.
  • Updated/fixed various man pages. (Addresses Debian Bug: #798425)
  • Programmer's Notes:
  • Fixed coverity, sparce gcc -Wall, and clang warnings/nits.
  • Added Android build files so that e2fsprogs can be built in the Android source tree.
  • Reduce the use of libc functions in libext2fs that may not be present in the boot loader environment, at least for those functions that are needed by boot loadsers such as yaboot.
  • Developers can now overide the debugging and optimization flags by redefining the CFLAGS makefile macro.
  • The libext2fs library now has support for fallocate.
  • The mke2fs command will now ask the user for confirmation if block device or image file contains an existing file system image, and stdout and stdin are connected to a tty.
  • The libext2fs library now picks a more intelligent goal block when doing block allocations.
  • The libext2fs library will now automatically set the BLOCK_UNINT flag if all of the blocks in a block group are free, to speed up future e2fsck and dumpe2fs operations on the file system.
  • Add two new functions ext2fs_new_range() and ext2fs_alloc_range() to libext2fs.
  • The ext2fs_zero_blocks() command will use FALLOC_FL_ZERO_RANGE for file-based images.
  • The ext2fs_bmap() function supports new flags BMAP_UNINIT and BMAP_ZERO.
  • The ext2fs_new_block2() function will now call the alloc_block hook before checking fs->block_map.
  • Support for the MMP feature can now be disabled at compile time.
  • Added support to manipulate extended attributes to libext2fs.
  • Added a lot of new regression tests.
  • Added endian annotations so it's possible to scan e2fsprogs for endian problems using a static code analyzer.
  • Fixed memory leaks in libext2fs.
  • The e2fsck jbd2 handling code has been resynced with the 3.16 kernel. There is now a script in the contrib directory which automates most of the resync process.
  • The build system will now run cppcheck (a static code analysis tool) via "make C=1"

New in E2fsprogs 1.42.13 (May 18, 2015)

  • Fixed a potential buffer overflow while closing a file system in libext2fs. (CVE-2015-1572, Addresses Debian Bug: #778948)
  • Fixed a bug which could cause e2fsck to corrupt Hurd file systems. (Addresses Debian Bug: #760275)
  • Fixed a deadlock which occurs when using systemd and e2fsck.conf's logging feature. (Addresses Debian Bug: #775234)
  • Fixed a bug which could cause programs using libext2's inode table scanning functions from crashing on certain corrupted file systems. (Addresses Debian Bug: #773795)
  • Fixed dumpe2fs so it won't crash if the user doesn't specify a block device (file system). (Addresses Debian Bug: #764293)
  • Fixed e2fsck so if it notices unexpected HTREE blocks in pass 2, it will report the correct directory inode containing the inconsistency.
  • If e2fsck fails to grow the dir_info structure due realloc(3) not having enough memory, it will now fail with explanatory message instead of staggering on failing with a confusing internal error messages.
  • The tune2fs program will zero out the superblock journal backup information when removing a journal from a file system.
  • The mke2fs program now enables the large_file feature by default.
  • Fixed a bug which could cause badblocks to crash if there are millions and millions of bad blocks.
  • Fixed some use-after-free bug in resize2fs and e2fsck.
  • Fixed a memory leak in tune2fs.
  • Fixed some bigendian bugs that had crept into both indirect and extent handling inside libext2fs.
  • Updated/fixed various man pages.
  • Update Esperanto, German, and Spanish translations. Added Danish translation.

New in E2fsprogs 1.42.12 (Aug 30, 2014)

  • Fix various e2fsck bugs when trying to repair bigalloc file systems.
  • E2fsck can now repair a file system with an overly large s_first_meta_bg field, which had previously caused all e2fsprogs programs to crash when trying to open such a file system.
  • Fix e2fsck so that it can correctly fix a number of rare file system corruptions that were discovered when using a file system fuzzer.
  • Fix e2fsck so it does not try to write back block group descriptors if they have not been modified.
  • Mke2fs program will now place metadata blocks in the last flex_bg so they are contiguous. This reduces free space fragmentation in a freshly created file system, as well as allowing mke2fs commands which request extremely large flex_bg size to succeed.
  • Mke2fs now creates hugefiles more efficiently (with fewer extent tree blocks).
  • Fix a 32/64-bit overflow bug that could cause resize2fs to loop forever. (Addresses-Launchpad-Bug: #1321958)
  • The resize2fs program will now use much less memory when resizing very large file systems.
  • Fix a bug which could cause resize2fs to get confused and produce a corrupted file system when shrinking a file system that had been previously expanded and converted to use the meta_bg file system format, but which no longer needs to use the meta_bg file system format any longer. This typically happened with large (> 16TB) file systems. (Addresses Debian Bug: #756922)
  • The e4defrag program will now defrag backwards-allocated files.
  • Fix tune2fs updating UUID's when manipulating file systems with external journals (both the file system and journal UUID).
  • Fix tune2fs so it can remove an external journal for file systems with a 1k block size.
  • Add a new debugfs command, "inode_dump", which prints the inode in hex and ASCII format.
  • The debugfs's "set_inode_field" will now automatically allocate blocks for indirect blocks and extent tree blocks.
  • Fix debugfs's "set_inode_field" so can properly handle "block[IND|DIND|TIND]".
  • The debugfs "rdump" command will now take multiple source arguments.
  • Fixed a double close(2) bug in "rdump" and "rdump -p".
  • Fix debugfs's argument parsing for the freefrag command.
  • Fix filefrag to properly handle using the FIBMAP ioctl (with -B). (Addresses Launchpad Bug: #1356496)
  • Clarified messages that were confusing users in debugfs, e2fsck, mke2fs, and resize2fs (Addresses Debian Bugs: #758029, #757543, #757544)
  • Dumpe2fs will now complain if extra arguments are given to it. (Addresses Debian Bug: #758074)
  • Updated/fixed various man pages. (Addresses-Debian-Bug: #726760)
  • Update Czech, Dutch, French, Polish, Spanish, Sweedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese translations.

New in E2fsprogs 1.42.11 (Jul 15, 2014)

  • Add support so that mke2fs can create hugefiles so that they are aligned relative to the beginning of the disk, instead of relative to the beginning of the partition, using the mke2fs.conf configuration parameter "hugefiles_align_disk".
  • Fix a bug which causes e2fsck to abort a journal replay on a file system with bigalloc enabled. (Addresses Debian Bug: #744953)
  • Add sanity checks so that mke2fs will refuse insanely large flex_bg counts specified by the -G option. Insanely large flex_bg sizes can result in a file system which can't be unmounted, or with extremely pessimal metadata layouts.
  • The mke2fs program will provide a better metadata layout for moderately large (but believable) flex_bg counts, such as 133,072.
  • The mke2fs progam will also check the kernel version number to determine whether the lazy_itable_init option is supported, so that lazy inode table initialization can be used even if the ext4 is compiled as a module which isn't loaded at the time that mke2fs is run.
  • Add description of ext4's mount options to the ext4 section 5 man page.
  • Improve the chattr man page and clean up the chattr usage message.
  • E2fsck will now automatically fix a last mount time or last write time which is in the future in preen mode, instead of aborting the fsck check.
  • Mke2fs will now check the file system revision number requested by the command line, and reject it if it is too large. A file system with an unsupported revision number will not be accepted by any of the other file system tools, and this command line option is rarely used, so let's try to help the user not shoot their own foot off.
  • The debugfs progam can now set the error count and associated first_error and last_error fields in the superblock using the set_super_value command.
  • Resize2fs will not try to calculate the minimum size of a file system if it contains errors. Otherwise a very badly corrupted file system image can cause the minimum size calculation to loop forwever. Since resize2fs will not allow a file system marked as containing errors to be resized. It's pointless to calculate the minimum size, so just skip it.
  • Fixed a typo in one of mke2fs's error message.
  • If filefrag runs into an error, it will continue processing the rest of the files specified on thec ommand line, but then exit with an error code.
  • Filefrag now prints some additional new flags (such as FIEMAP_EXTENT_ENCODED), and print unknown flags as hex values.
  • Fixed support in filefrag for files with > 2**32 blocks on 32-bit platforms.
  • Fixed a file descriptor leak in debugfs when copying files.
  • Fixed a regression introduced in 1.42.10 which caused mke2fs to fail to create file systems larger than 2GB on 32-bit platforms. (Addresses Red Hat Bugzilla: #1099892, Debian Bug: #752107)
  • Add Esparanto and Ukrainian translations, and update Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Sweedish, and Vietnamese translations.
  • Fixed various compiler warnings.

New in E2fsprogs 1.42.9 (Dec 30, 2013)

  • Mke2fs will detect an attempt to create a file system on a loop mounted file and complain without the -FF option. Also fixed mke2fs so it allows the creation of a file system on a mounted device with two -F options, as documented in the man page, instead of three -F options.
  • Fixed a large number of bugs in resize2fs, e2fsck, debugfs, and libext2fs to correctly handle bigalloc and 64-bit file systems. There were many corner cases that had not been noticed in previous uses of these file systems, since they are not as common. Some of the bugs could cause file system corruption or data loss, so users of 64-bit or bigalloc file systems are strongly urged to upgrade to e2fsprogs 1.42.9.
  • The tune2fs program will now not allow changing the uuid on a mounted file system which has the uninit_bg feature enabled. This avoids a nasty race where the kernel and tune2fs are both retrying rewrite the group descriptors at the same time, with different ideas about what the UUID should be.
  • When e2fsck is rehashing an extent-mapped directory, it's possible (although very rare) that an extent block will need to be allocated; fix e2fsck to make sure that the block gets marked as used.
  • Mke2fs will now properly set the LARGE_FILE feature when creating a journal >= 2GB --- which can happen when using 64k block size.
  • Fixed debugfs so that its freei command will correctly handle a request to free a range of consecutive inodes.
  • Fixed 2fsck so it will not erroneously complain that an external journal is invalid if it is exactly 2**32 blocks.
  • Fixed e2fsck so it won't try checking for, and adding, a missing lost+found directory when running in read-only mode.
  • Fixed e2image to avoid some buffer overruns which would cause it to when creating a standard (non-raw, non-qcow2) image file. Standard e2image files are actually very rarely used, so we didn't notice when the changes to enable the qcow2 format broke this e2image mode.
  • Fixed mke2fs so that the extended option "-E resize=NNN" will not turn on the resize_inode feature when the meta_bg feature is set, since these two features can not be set at the same time.
  • Fixed tune2fs so that when it disables the quota feature, it updates all of the backup superblocks.
  • Fixed dumpe2fs that would cause it to abort when run using an image file when trying to print the journal information (which is not present in an e2image created image file).
  • Fixed a potential integer overflow in e2reefrag. (Addresses-Debian-Bug: #718205)
  • Enhance debugfs so that when copying a sparse file from a native file system into the file system image using the "write" command, it will create a sparse file into the destination file system.
  • Enhanced debugfs so it can support a command line which is up to 8k long.
  • E2image will refuse (unless the -f option is specified to force the issue) to create a raw or qcow image using a mounted file system, unless the -f option is specified to force the issue.
  • E2image has been optimized for using it to efficiently copy a file system by only copying the allocated blocks, by using the options -ra. New options (-o and -O) have been added so that a source and destination offset can be given. The -p option will print progress information so the user will know how far along the copy is going. And finally, the new option -c is useful for updating a file system on an SSD, by avoiding unnecessary writes. E2image can also shift a file system image by doing an in place move.
  • Fix a regression introduced in 1.42.8 which would cause e2fsck to erroneously report uninitialized extents past the EOF (as determined by i_size) to be invalid.
  • Fixed resize2fs so under a corner case when an inode has a complex extent tree, it will not corrupt an interior node in the extent tree.
  • Fixed resize2fs which would sometimes corrupt a file system when shrinking a file system to a minimum size using resize2fs -M. (Addresses Debian Bug: #660793)
  • Fixed resize2fs so that it will relocate inode table blocks if this becomes necessary when shrinking the file system.
  • Fixed resize2fs and e2fsck so they will not crash when hit a failure while operating on a file system with the MMP feature enabled.
  • Fixed a bug in debugfs which caused it create an invalid inode when trying to write a zero-length file.
  • E2fsck will no longer crash if it tries to delete an invalid extent-mapped symlink.
  • E2fsck will no longer crash if it comes across an directory which is larger than 2GB (which is not allowed in valid file systems).
  • Fixed debugfs's help texts to fully document all options and otherwise be more helpful.
  • Updated/fixed various man pages. (Addresses Debian Bugs: #586218, #669730, #698076)
  • Fixed various Debian Packaging Issues (#698879, #721365)

New in E2fsprogs 1.42.7 (Jan 22, 2013)

  • Add warnings to mke2fs, resize2fs, and tune2fs that the bigalloc and quota features are still under development. For more information please see:
  • https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Bigalloc
  • https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Quota
  • Add some new options to filefrag from Lustre's patches to e2fsprogs:
  • add -k option to print extents in kB-sized units (like df -k)
  • add -b {blocksize} to print extents in blocksize units
  • add -e option to print extent format, even when FIBMAP is used
  • add -X option to print extents in hexadecimal format
  • Fix resize2fs so that it can handle off-line resizes of file systems with the flex_bg feature but without a resize_inode (or if we run out of reserved gdt blocks). This also fixes a problem where if the user creates a filesystem with a restricted number of reserved gdt blocks, an off-line resize which grows the file system could potentially result in file system corruption.
  • Fix a resize2fs bug which could cause it to corrupt bigalloc file systems when doing an off-line resize.
  • Further optimize resize2fs so it doesn't use quite as much CPU when resizing very large file systems.
  • Fixed 32-bit overflow bugs which could cause resize2fs to fail and possibly corrupt the file system while resizing 64-bit file systems.
  • Fix a bug in mke2fs where parsing "-E resize=NNN" will result in a mke2fs crash due to a divide-by-zero if the 64bit file system feature is enabled.
  • Add better error checking to mke2fs to check for invalid parameters when creating bigalloc file system.
  • When creating bigalloc filesystems, the -g option to mke2fs will now specify the number of clusters per block group.
  • Add to debugfs the functionality to corrupt a specific file system block via the "zap_block" command.
  • Add to debugfs the functionality to print out a hex dump of a block in the file system via the "block_dump" command.
  • Add to debugfs the functionality to manipulate the extent tree directly via the "extent_open" command.
  • Fixed debugfs's mknod command so that it updates the block group statistics.
  • Fix e2fsck so it can detect and fix inconsistencies in the interior nodes of an inode's extent tree.
  • Fix a potential memory corruption failure in e2fsck's error path if the call to ext2fs_open2() fails.
  • Fix e2fsck if its logging function is enabled in e2fsck.conf, and the resulting file name for the log file is longer than 100 bytes, that it properly handles this situation instead of crashing.
  • E2fsck will now report the amount of memory that it attempted to allocate when a memory allocation request fails, to make it easier to track down the problem.
  • Fix mke2fs's handling of the mmp_update_interval option. (Addresses Lustre Bug: LU-1888)
  • E2image can now include all data blocks in the e2image output file when the user specifies the -a option.
  • If e2fsprogs is compiled without --enable-quota, make sure that tune2fs can not turn on the feature for new-style quota support, since afterwards, none of the e2fsprogs tools will be willing to touch that file system.
  • Optimize e2fsck's so that it uses much less CPU for large file systems. This can result in significant speedups, especially on CPU-constrained systems. This was primarily done by optimizing libext2fs's bitmap functions. (Addresses Google Bug: #7534813)
  • Fix debugfs's htree command so that all its messages are sent through the pager.
  • Fixed debugfs's "dump_file" and "cat" functions work correctly on file systems whose block size is greater than 8k.
  • Fix e2freefrag so it works on 64-bit file systems, and so it uses much less memory. (Addresses Google Bug: 7269948)
  • Update the spd_readdir.c file in the contrib directory to include some additions which were made in 2008 that didn't get folded into the version which we checked into the e2fsprogs source tree. These enhancements include thread safety, support for readdir64_r(), and safe_getenv() support in case spd_readdir.so is used for setuid binaries.
  • Update Czech, Dutch, French, German, Polish, Sweedish, and Vietnamese translations
  • Add a command to debugfs to create symlinks.
  • Document the bigalloc feature in the mke2fs man page. (Addresses Debian Bug: #669730)
  • Programmer's Notes
  • Fix gcc -Wall nits.
  • Fix a spelling typo in the libext2fs texinfo documentation.
  • Change the output from "make check" so that tools such as emacs's "M-x compile" does not mistake the output as containing a compiler error.
  • Export two new functions from libext2fs: ext2fs_extent_node_split() and ext2fs_extent_goto2().
  • The ext2fs_extents_fix_parents() was fixed so it does not modify the location of the extent handle if its current location is at an interior node, rather than a leaf node of an inode's extent tree.
  • Add a regression test to assure that e2fsck can correctly fix an inconsistent interior node in an inode's extent tree.
  • The ext2fs_{mark,unmark,test}_block_bitmap_range2() functions now correctly support bigalloc file systems which use store block usage information in units of clusters.
  • Fixed the help text in the configure script for --enable-quota.
  • The m68k-specific bitops code has been removed since they were incorrectly treating bit numbers with the high bit set as signed integers. Furthermore, modern compilers do a good enough job optimizing the generic code there is no point in having the m68k specific asm statements.
  • Fixed how we link the test programs so they always use the static libraries, so that we test using the libraries which we have just built.
  • Update config.guess and config.sub to the latest versions from the GNU project.
  • Fixed the com_err.texinfo file so that it can produce a valid postscript/pdf printed output.
  • Add a regression test which checks debugfs's ability to create symlinks, named FIFO's, and device nodes.
  • Add a function ext2fs_symlink(), which creates symlinks to the libext2fs library.
  • Add debugging code so we can test old kernel interfaces for online resize to resize2fs. This backwards compatibility checking is keyed off of the RESIZE2FS_KERNEL_VERSION, which is designed to allow us to test the functionality of the kernel's older resize ioctls without needing to install an old version of resize2fs, and to also test a modern resize2fs's ability to work with older kernels without having to install an older version of the kernel.

New in E2fsprogs 1.41.13 (Dec 14, 2010)

  • E2fsck now supports the extended option "-E journal_only", which causes it to only do a journal replay. This is useful for scripts that want to first replay the journal and then check to see if it contains errors.
  • E2fsck will now support UUID= and LABEL= specifiers for the -j option (which specifies where to find the external journal). (Addresses Debian Bug #559315)
  • E2fsck now has support for the problems//force_no configuration option in e2fsck.conf, which forces a problem to not be fixed.
  • Dumpe2fs will now avoid printing large negative offsets for the bitmap blocks and instead print a message which is a bit more helpful for flex_bg file systems.
  • Mke2fs will now check the file system type (specified with the -t option) to make sure it is defined in the mke2fs.conf file; if it is not, it will print an error and abort. If the usage type (specified with the -T option) is not defined in mke2fs.conf, mke2fs will print a warning but will continue. (Addresses Debian Bug #594609)
  • Clarified error message from resize2fs clarifying that on-line shrinking is not supported at all. (Addresses Debian Bug #599786)
  • Fix an e2fsck bug that could cause a PROGRAMMING BUG error to be displayed. (Addresses Debian Bug #555456)
  • E2fsck will open the external journal in exclusive mode, to prevent the journal from getting truncated while it is in use due to a user accidentally trying to run e2fsck on a snapshotted file system volume. (Addresses Debian Bug #587531)
  • Fix a bug in e2fsck so it has the correct test for the EOFBLOCKS_FL flag.
  • The tune2fs program can now set the uninit_bg feature without requiring an fsck.
  • The tune2fs, dumpe2fs, and debugfs programs now support the new ext4 default mount options settings which were added in 2.6.35.
  • The e2fsck and dumpe2fs programs now support the new ext4 superblock fields which track where and when the first and most recent file system errors occurred. These fields are displayed by dumpe2fs and cleared by e2fsck. These new superblock fields were added in 2.6.36.
  • Debugfs now uses a more concicse format for listing extents in its stat command. This format also includes the interior extent tree blocks, which previously was missing from stat's output for extent-based files.
  • Debugfs has a new option, -D, which will request Direct I/O access of the file system.
  • Mke2fs will skip initializing the inode table if a device supports discard and the discard operation will result in zero'ed blocks.
  • Badblocks will now correctly backspace over UTF-8 characters when displaying its progress bar. (Addresses Gentoo Bug #309909; Addresses Debian Bugs #583782 and #587834)
  • E2freefrag will now display the total number of free extents.
  • Resize2fs -P no longer requires a freshly checked filesystem before printing the minimum resize size.
  • Fixed a floating point precision error in a binary tree search routine that can lead to seg fault in e2fsck and resize2fs.
  • Fixed a bug in e2fsck where if both the original and backup superblock are invalid in some way, e2fsck will fail going back to the original superblock because it didn't close the backup superblock first, and the exclusive open prevented the file system from being reopened.
  • Fixed a big in e2freefrag which caused getopt parsing to fail on architectures with unsigned chars. (Addresses Gentoo Bug: #299386)
  • Clarified an mke2fs error message so a missed common in an -E option (i.e., mke2fs -t ext4 -E stride=128 stripe-width=512 /dev/sda1") results in a more understandable explanation to the user.
  • Mke2fs now displays the correct valid inode ratio range when complaining about an invalid inode ratio specified by the user.
  • Mke2fs now understands the extended option "discard" and "nodiscard", and the older option -K is deprecated. The default of whether discards are enabled by default can be controled by the mke2fs.conf file.
  • Mke2fs's handling of logical and physical sector sizes has been improved to reflect the fact that there will be some SSD's with 8k and 16k physical sectors arriving soon. Mke2fs will no longer force block size to be the physical sector size, since there will be devices where the physical sector size is larger than the system's page size, and hence larger than the maximal supported block size. In addition, if the minimal and optimal io size are not exported by the device, and the physical sector size is larger than the block size, the physical sector size will be used to set the Raid I/O optimization hints in the superblock.
  • E2fsck will now display a better, more specific error message when the user enters a typo'ed device name, instead of blathering on about alternate superblocks.
  • Fixed various Debian Packaging Issues
  • Updated/clarified man pages (Addresses Debian Bugs: #580236, #594004, #589345, #591083; Addresses Launchpad Bug: #505719)
  • Update the Chinese, Chzech, Dutch, French, Germany, Indonesian, Polish, Swedish, and Vietnamese translations.
  • Programmer's Notes:
  • Fix a dependency definition for the static and profiled blkid libraries which could cause compile failures in some configurations. (Addresses Debian Bug: #604629)
  • Add support for Direct I/O in the Unix I/O access layer.
  • Fixed a memory leak in the Unix I/O layer when changing block sizes.
  • Fixed minor memory leaks in mke2fs.
  • Added a new function to the ext2fs library, ext2fs_get_memalign().
  • The tst_super_size test program will check to make sure the superblock fields are correctly aligned and will print them out so they can be manually checked for correctness.
  • Fixed some makefile dependencies for test programs in lib/ext2fs.
  • Reserved the feature flags and superblock fields needed for the Next3 snapshot feature.
  • Reserved the feature flags for EXT4_FEATURE_INCOMPAT_DIRDATA and EXT4_INCOMPAT_EA_INODE.

New in E2fsprogs 1.41.7 (Jul 1, 2009)

  • Fix a bug in libext2fs which can cause e2fsck and resize2fs to write uninitalized data into the portion of the inode beyond the first 128 bytes when operating on inodes mapped via extents; potentially corrupting filesystems.
  • Fix memory leaks in e2fsprogs, including a very large memory leak which can cause e2fsck to run out of memory when checking very large filesystems using extents.
  • The logsave program will now filter out the ^A and ^B characters when writing to the console.
  • Harden ext2fs_validate_entry() so that lsdel will not read beyond the end of the block even if the directory block is corrupted.
  • Fix debugfs from core dumping if the logdump command fails to open the output file.
  • Enhance badblocks to print the currently tested block number when interrupted with ^C.
  • Fix lsattr to exit with a non-zero status when it encounters errors. (Addresses RedHat Bugzilla #489841)
  • Fix e2fsprogs to use the same encoding for rec_len in 64k (and larger) filesystems as the kernel when encoding rec_len >= 64k. For 64k filesystems (currently all that is supported by e2fsprogs, this is only a minor corner case).
  • Resize2fs will now update the journal backup fileds in the sup0erblock if the journal is moved; this avoids an unnecessary full fsck after resizing the filesystem. (Addresses RedHat Bugzilla: #505339)
  • Fix libext2fs to properly initialize i_extra_size when creating the journal and resize inodes.
  • Change badblocks to allow block sizes larger than 4k.
  • Fix filefrag progam so it correctly checks for errors from the fiemap ioctl.
  • Update Chinese and Czech translation from the Translation Project.
  • Clean up various man pages. (Addresses Debian Bug #531385 and #523063)

New in E2fsprogs 1.41.6 (May 31, 2009)

  • Fix a critical regression in e2fsck introduced version 1.41.5 which
  • can undo updates to the block group descriptors after a journal replay.
  • If e2fsck receives an I/O error while replaying the journal, prompt
  • the user whether they want to ignore the error or not; if e2fsck is
  • run in preen mode, force fsck to abort the preen pass.
  • Fix a bug which would cause e2fsck to core dump if the filesystem
  • contains a corrupt extent header, and the user declines to clear the
  • inode. (Addresses Sourceforge Bug: #2791794)
  • Fix e2fsck to restart only once in the case of multiple block groups
  • which inodes in use that are in the uninitialized part of the block
  • group's inode table.
  • To reduce user confusion, if the /etc/mtab file is missing
  • ext2fs_check_mount_point and ext2fs_check_if_mounted will return a
  • new, explicit error code to indicate this case. This will cause
  • e2fsck to give a clearer error message when the user is using buggy
  • rescue CD's that don't properly set up /etc/mtab. (Addresses Debian
  • Bug: #527859)
  • Fix e2fsck so that if the primary group descriptors are corrupted, but
  • the backup superblock is entirely invalid, to go back to using (and
  • fixing) the priary group descriptors instead of completely giving up
  • on the filesystem. (Addresses Debian Bug: #516820)
  • Change e2fsck to not abort a preen pass if an inode is found to have
  • i_file_acl_hi non-zero. Ext3 filesystems don't care, and newer
  • kernels (post 2.6.29) will ignore this field. So let's fix it
  • automatically during the preen pass instead of forcing the user to fix
  • this up manually. (Addresses Debian Bug: #526524)
  • Add resource tracking for e2fsck passes 1b through 1d.
  • Speed up e2fsck by eliminating unnecessary journal checks if the
  • filesystem is already mounted and doesn't need recovery (since the
  • kernel would have run the journal when the filesystem was mounted.)
  • Also speed up e2fsck by avoiding unnecessary block group descriptor
  • updates in ext2fs_close().
  • Add support to chattr to migrate inodes from using direct/indirect
  • blocks to extents.
  • Avoid corrupting the filesystem if there is an attempt to shrink a
  • filesystem using resize2fs smaller than posible by making
  • ext2fs_set_bmap() more careful not to delete the old block until the
  • new block can be inserted. In addition, fix a bug in how the minimum
  • size of the filesystem (plus a safety margin) is calculated, and
  • modify resize2fs to refuse to shrink the filesystem below that minimum
  • size without the force flag.
  • Teach blkid to try to figure out DM device names using take advantage
  • of information in sysfs when running on kernels (2.6.29 and later)
  • which provide this information in /sys/block/dm-/dm/name; this is
  • much faster than scanning for the devncie number in /dev/mapper.
  • Fix blkid to prefer /dev/mapper/ device names instad of the
  • private /dev/dm-X names.
  • Add an -a option to debugfs's close_filesys command which writes any
  • changes to the superblock or block group descriptors to all of the
  • backup superblock locations.
  • Add support to the filefrag program to use the FIEMAP ioctl.
  • Update Chinese translation from the Translation Project.
  • Clean up various man pages. (Addresses Red Hat Bugzilla: #502971 and
  • Launchpad Bug: #381854)
  • Fixed various Debian packaging issues --- see debian/changelog for
  • details. (Addresses Debian Bug #506064)

New in E2fsprogs 1.41.5 (Apr 24, 2009)

  • Fix a number of filesystem corruption bugs in resize2fs when growingor shrinking ext4 filesystems off-line (i.e., when the ext4 filesystemis not mounted).
  • Debugfs can now set i_file_acl_high via the set_inodes_field command, and print a 64-bit file acl.
  • Speed up e2fsck when checking clean filesystems by avoiding unnecessary block reads, and coalescing the block group descriptorblocks so they are read using a single read operation.
  • The libuuid library will now close all file descriptors before runninguuidd.
  • In order to avoid unnecessary full filesystem checks by e2fsck afteran on-line resize, e2fsck will ignore the NEEDS_RECOVERY flag set on the backup superblocks. (Addresses Red Hat Bugzilla: #471925)
  • Mke2fs will avoid trying to create the journal when run insuperblock-only mode (mke2fs -S), since the left-over journal in theinode table will cause mke2fs to fail.
  • Fix a bug in libext2fs functions that check to see if a particular device or filesystem image is mounted, which would cause these functions to report that a file identical to the (relative) pathname used by a pseudo-filesystem was mounted when in fact it was not.
  • Update Czech translation from the Translation Project.
  • Add Chinese (simplified) translation from the Translation Project.
  • Fix support for external journals (which was broken in e2fsprogs 1.41.4).
  • Fix a regression in debugfs where the "stat" command when no filesystem was open would cause debugfs to crash with a segmentation violation.
  • Starting in the 2.6.29 linux kernel, the ext4 filesystem driver can be used to support filesystems without a journal. Update the blkid library so it understands this.
  • The blkid library will remove an entry from the blkid cache representing the entire disk if partitions are found, since presuambly the device previously had no partition table, but has now transitioned to using a partition table.
  • Add a check to mke2fs and tune2fs that the argument to the -m option (which specifies the reserved ratio) must be greater than zero. (Addresses Debian Bug: #517015)
  • Add support for tracking the number kilobytes written to the filesystem via the superblock field s_kbytes_written. It will be updated by the kernel as well as by e2fsprogs programs which write to the filesystem. This is useful for tracking the wear to filesystems on Solid Sstate Drives.
  • Fix compatibility issue in the libext2fs info file and makeinfo version 4.12. (Addresses Red Hat Bugzilla: #481620)
  • Update/clarify man pages. (Addresses Debian Bug: #515693, #365619)
  • Fixed various Debian packaging issues

New in E2fsprogs 1.41.4 (Jan 28, 2009)

  • Fixed a bug which could sometimes cause blkid to return an exit value of zero for a non-existent device (Addresses Debian Bug: #502541) Blkid will now recognize ext3 filesystems that have the test_fs flag set as ext3 filesystems. The blkid library will now recognize btrfs filesystems and swap devices currently used by user-level software suspend. Tune2fs now updates the block group checksums when changing the UUID to avoid causing e2fsck to complain vociferously at the next reboot. Tune2fs's inode size resizing algorithms have been fixed so it is not vastly inefficient for moderate-to-large filesystems, due to some O(n**2) and O(n*m) algorithms that didn't scale well at all. Fix tune2fs's inode resizing algorithm so it will not corrupt filesystems laid out for RAID filesystems; in addition, tune2fs will refuse to change the inode size for filesystems that have the flex_bg feature enabled. (This is a limitation in the current implementation of tune2fs -I.) E2fsprogs 1.41 broke debugfs's logdump command for normal ext3/4 filesystems with 32-bit block numbers, when the headers for 64-bit block numbers was added. This regression has been fixed. Debugfs's ncheck command has been fixed to avoid printing garbage characters at the end of file names. Fix resize2fs for ext4 filesystems. Some blocks that that need moving when shrinking filesystems with uninit_bg feature would not be moved. In addition, blocks and inode table blocks were not being correctly freed when shrinking filesystems with the flex_bg feable, which caused resize2fs -M to fail. Finally, when blocks are moved, make sure the uninitialized flag in extents is preserved. Fix bug which caused dumpe2fs to abort with an error if run on a filesystem that contained an external journal. Some distributions used "mke3fs" as an alias for "mkfs.ext3"; check for this in argv[0] to provide better legacy support for these distributions. This is a practice that should NOT be continued, however. Mke2fs now has a new option -U, which allows the user to specify the UUID that should be used for the new filesystem. Mke2fs will treat devices that are exactly 16TB as if they were 16TB minus one block. This allows users who have read that ext3 supports up to 16TB filesystems and who create a 16TB LVM to not get confused, since the true limit is really 16TB minus one block. E2fsck will no longer abort an fsck run if block group has an errant INODE_UNINIT flag. E2fsck now distinguishes between fragmented directories and fragmented files in verbose mode statistics and in the fragcheck report. Fix a bug in e2fsck which casued it double count non-contiguous extent-based inodes. E2fsck will leave some slack space when repacking directories to allow room for a few directory entries to be added without causing leaf nodes to be split right away. Fix a bug which caused e2fsck to crash when it comes across a corrupted interior node in an extent tree with the error message: "Error1: Corrupt extent header on inode XXXXXX" E2fsck problem descriptions involving the journal are no longer referred to as "ext3" problems, since ext4 filesystems also have journals. Fix a long-standing bug in e2fsck which would cause it to crash when replying journals for filesystems with block sizes greater than 8k. Update Catalan translation from the Translation Project. Fixed various Debian packaging issues --- see debian/changelog for details. (Addresses Debian Bugs: #503057, #502323, #511207) Programmer's Notes ------------------ Fix build of e2fsck.profiled, and add support for building profiled binaries in the misc directory if configured with --enable-profile. The ext2fs_open() function now performs more sanity checks on the superblock to avoid potential divide by zero errors by other parts of library. The ext2fs_read_inode_full() function now has a safety check to avoid a segmentation fault on corrupted filesystems. The ext2fs_new_inode() function now has a sanity check so that if the s_first_inode field in the superblock is insane, it will return EXT2_ET_INODE_ALLOC_FAIL instead of returning an invalid inode number. To avoid segmentation faults, ext2fs_block_alloc_stats() and ext2fs_inode_alloc_stats() now validates the passed inode or block number to avoid overrunning an array boundary. Various signed/unsigned errors for variables containing block numbers have been fixed. Accomodations for gcc's stupidity in not realizing that constant strings that do not contain a '%' character are safe to use in format strings have been made so that distributions that want to compile e2fsprogs with -Werror=format-security have an easier time doing so. Added a new 64-bit getsize interface, ext2fs_get_device_size2(). Added the utility make-sparse.c to the contrib directory. The ext2fs_block_iterate2() function now reflects errors from ext2fs_extent_set_bmap() to the caller, if the callback tries to change a block on an extent-based file, and ext2fs_extent_set_bmap() fails for some reason (for example, there isn't enough disk space to split a node and expand the extent tree. The ext2fs_block_iterate2() function will preserve the uninit flag in extents when the callback function modifies a block in an extent-based file. E2fsck will now flag filesystems that have an insane s_first_ino field in their superblock, and attempt to use a backup superblock to repair the filesystem.

New in E2fsprogs 1.41.3 (Oct 13, 2008)

  • E2fsck has been fixed so it prints the correct inode number for
  • uinit_bg related problems.
  • E2fsck will now offer to clear the test_fs flag if the ext4 filesystem
  • is available on linux. This can be disabled via a configuration
  • option in /etc/e2fsck.conf.
  • Fix a file descriptor leak in libblkid when checking to see if an ext4
  • or ext4dev module exists.
  • Fix a bug in e2fsck where in preen mode, if there are disk I/O errors
  • while trying to close a filesystem can lead to infinite loops.
  • (Addresses Red Hat Bugzilla #465679)
  • Fix a bug in resize2fs where passing in a bogus new size of 0 blocks
  • will cause resize2fs to drop into an infinite loop. (Addresses Red
  • Hat Bugzilla: #465984)
  • Add a check in the Unix I/O functions in libext2fs so that when a
  • device is opened read/write, return an error if the device is
  • read-only using the BLKROGET ioctl.
  • Fix debugfs's ncheck command so that it prints all of the names of
  • hardlinks in the same directory.
  • Fix a bug in libblkid so it correctly detects whether the ext4 and
  • ext4dev filesystems are available, so that the ext4dev->ext4
  • fallback code works correctly.
  • Programmer's Notes:
  • Fix a parallel build problem by making sure util/subst is built before
  • trying to build the lib/et directory. (Addresses Sourceforge Bug:
  • #2143281)
  • Updated "make depend" information for crc16.o