From cf7eff4666629de006c5ed78de79e40f483c3b06 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Eric Sandeen Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 14:33:00 -0500 Subject: ext3: allow specifying external journal by pathname mount option It's always been a hassle that if an external journal's device number changes, the filesystem won't mount. And since boot-time enumeration can change, device number changes aren't unusual. The current mechanism to update the journal location is by passing in a mount option w/ a new devnum, but that's a hassle; it's a manual approach, fixing things after the fact. Adding a mount option, "-o journal_path=/dev/$DEVICE" would help, since then we can do i.e. # mount -o journal_path=/dev/disk/by-label/$JOURNAL_LABEL ... and it'll mount even if the devnum has changed, as shown here: # losetup /dev/loop0 journalfile # mke2fs -L mylabel-journal -O journal_dev /dev/loop0 # mkfs.ext3 -L mylabel -J device=/dev/loop0 /dev/sdb1 Change the journal device number: # losetup -d /dev/loop0 # losetup /dev/loop1 journalfile And today it will fail: # mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/test mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so # dmesg | tail -n 1 [17343.240702] EXT3-fs (sdb1): error: couldn't read superblock of external journal But with this new mount option, we can specify the new path: # mount -o journal_path=/dev/loop1 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/test # (which does update the encoded device number, incidentally): # umount /dev/sdb1 # dumpe2fs -h /dev/sdb1 | grep "Journal device" dumpe2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010) Journal device: 0x0701 But best of all we can just always mount by journal-path, and it'll always work: # mount -o journal_path=/dev/disk/by-label/mylabel-journal /dev/sdb1 /mnt/test # So the journal_path option can be specified in fstab, and as long as the disk is available somewhere, and findable by label (or by UUID), we can mount. Signed-off-by: Eric Sandeen Signed-off-by: Jan Kara --- Documentation/filesystems/ext3.txt | 7 ++++--- 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) (limited to 'Documentation/filesystems/ext3.txt') diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/ext3.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/ext3.txt index 293855e95000..7ed0d17d6721 100644 --- a/Documentation/filesystems/ext3.txt +++ b/Documentation/filesystems/ext3.txt @@ -26,11 +26,12 @@ journal=inum When a journal already exists, this option is ignored. Otherwise, it specifies the number of the inode which will represent the ext3 file system's journal file. +journal_path=path journal_dev=devnum When the external journal device's major/minor numbers - have changed, this option allows the user to specify + have changed, these options allow the user to specify the new journal location. The journal device is - identified through its new major/minor numbers encoded - in devnum. + identified through either its new major/minor numbers + encoded in devnum, or via a path to the device. norecovery Don't load the journal on mounting. Note that this forces noload mount of inconsistent filesystem, which can lead to -- cgit