e2fsprogs/doc/RelNotes/v1.41.13

E2fsprogs 1.41.13 (December 13, 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/<problem code>/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 concise 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 controlled 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.