| Need to process the bad block inode *before* doing the inode scan. | 
 |  | 
 | Also check to see if the first block of the inode table is not on the | 
 | bad block scan, and fix that.  We need to check for an inaccurate | 
 | blocks, and fix them before we start doing anything else with the | 
 | filesystem! | 
 |  | 
 | --------------------------------------------------- | 
 | User request: | 
 |  | 
 | BTW: Could you please add some sort of deleted and possibly corrupted file | 
 |      and inode list to e2fsck report. There should be filenames deleted | 
 |      from directory inodes, files with duplicate blocks e.t.c. | 
 |      It's pretty annoying to filter this information from e2fsck output | 
 |      by hand :- | 
 |  | 
 | ------------------------------------------ | 
 |  | 
 | Add a "answer Yes always to this class of question" response. | 
 |  | 
 | ---------------------------------- | 
 |  | 
 | ext2fs_flush() should return a different error message for primary | 
 | versus backup superblock flushing, so that mke2fs can print an | 
 | appropriate error message. | 
 |  | 
 | --------------------------------- | 
 | Date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 21:46:14 +0100 | 
 | From: Sergio Polini <s.polini@mclink.it> | 
 |  | 
 |  | 
 | I'm reading the sorce code of e2fsck 1.14. | 
 | In pass2.c, lines 352-357, I read: | 
 |  | 
 | if ((dirent->name_len & 0xFF) > EXT2_NAME_LEN) { | 
 |         if (fix_problem(ctx, PR_2_FILENAME_LONG, &cd->pctx)) { | 
 |                 dirent->name_len = EXT2_NAME_LEN; | 
 |                 dir_modified++; | 
 |         } | 
 | } | 
 |  | 
 | I think that I'll never see any messages about too long filenames, | 
 | because "whatever & 0xFF" can never be "> 0xFF". | 
 | Am I wrong? | 
 | -------------------------------------- | 
 |  | 
 | Add chmod command to debugfs. | 
 |  | 
 | ------------------------------------------ | 
 |  | 
 | Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 17:54:53 -0800 (PST) | 
 | From: Alan Blanchard <alan@abraxas.to> | 
 | To: tytso@MIT.EDU | 
 | Subject: DEBUGFS - thanks and a feature idea | 
 | Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII | 
 |  | 
 | Theodore: | 
 |  | 
 | First, let me thank you for writing debugfs. Recently, my Linux box | 
 | (RH 6.0, 400 MHz PIII, on a DSL line) was hacked into.  The intruder did | 
 | an "rm -Rf" on a 34 GB drive with about 5GB of data on it.  I was able to | 
 | restore essentially the entire thing with debugfs and a bit of C code and Perl. | 
 | Actually, I could have done the entire thing with debugfs and Perl, but I | 
 | thought it would be too slow. | 
 |  | 
 | During this exercise, I noticed that one small feature was lacking that would | 
 | have made my job a bit easier.  The length of a deleted directory is | 
 | reported as 0, hence debugfs won't dump the contents of the directory to a | 
 | file using the "dump" command.  The only thing that saved me was that the | 
 | list of disk blocks is not zeroed out.  I was able to dump the contents of the | 
 | directories by using debugfs to get the relevant block numbers, then | 
 | using dd to get the actual data. | 
 |  | 
 | If debugfs had a feature where it ignored the size of a directory reported by | 
 | the inode and instead just dumped all the blocks, it would have facilited | 
 | things a bit. This seems like a very easy feature to add. | 
 |  | 
 | Again, thanks for writing debugfs (and all the other Linux stuff you've written!). | 
 |  | 
 | Cheers, | 
 | Alan Blanchard | 
 | alan@abraxas.to | 
 |  | 
 |  | 
 | ------------------------------------------------------------------- | 
 |  | 
 | Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 14:07:12 -0800 | 
 | From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@www.transmeta.com> | 
 | Subject: mkfs -cc and fsck -c | 
 |  | 
 | b) An option to mkfs to zero the partition.  Yes, it can be done with | 
 | dd, but it would be a nicer way of doing it. | 
 |  | 
 | ------------------------------------------------------------------ | 
 |  | 
 | Add support for in ext2fs_block_iterate() for a returning the | 
 | compressed flag blocks to block_iterate.  Change default to not return | 
 | EXT2_COMPRESSED_BLKADDR.  Change e2fsck to pass this flag in. | 
 |  | 
 | (The old compression patches did this by default all the time, which | 
 | is bad, since it meant e2fsck never saw the EXT2_COMPRESSED_BLKADDR | 
 | flagword. | 
 |  | 
 | ------------------------------------------------------------ | 
 |  | 
 | E2fsck should offer to clear all the blocks in an indirect block, not | 
 | the entire inode, so there's better recovery for when an indirect | 
 | block gets trashed. | 
 |  | 
 |  | 
 | ------------------------------------------------------------- | 
 |  | 
 | From: Yann Dirson - LOGATIQUE <Yann.Dirson@France.Sun.COM> | 
 | Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 13:52:13 +0100 (MET) | 
 |  | 
 | During my experiments on the broken system, I noticed the following in | 
 | the badblocks program (which I'm aware is not designed for IDE drives) | 
 | - I'd probably have already fixed them if my home system was up :( | 
 |  | 
 | * the syntax summary documents 2nd arg as blocks_count, which should | 
 | probably read something like end_count. | 
 |  | 
 | * testing past end of device is not detected, and lists those blocks | 
 | as bad, whereas they simply do not exist. | 
 |  | 
 |  | 
 | I think I'll probably add a "max count" option to findsuper(8), so | 
 | that I do not have to wait for the whole disk to be scanned when the | 
 | system had to be launched with "init=/bin/sh", in which case Ctrl-[CZ] | 
 | and friends appear to be absolutely ignored. | 
 |  | 
 |  | 
 | Somewhat unrelated, I just noticed the | 
 | http://web.mit.edu/tytso/www/linux/ext2.html could be updated: | 
 |  | 
 | - could mention SGI xfs (http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/ - they just | 
 |   release 0.03 snapshot) | 
 |  | 
 | ---------------------------------------------------------------- | 
 |  | 
 | Return-Path: <tytso@MIT.EDU> | 
 | Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 13:20:14 -0500 | 
 | From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU> | 
 | To: R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl | 
 | In-Reply-To: Rogier Wolff's message of Thu, 10 Feb 2000 08:46:30 +0100 (MET), | 
 | 	<200002100746.IAA24573@cave.bitwizard.nl> | 
 | Subject: Re: e2fsck request for enhancement. | 
 | Phone: (781) 391-3464 | 
 |  | 
 |    Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 08:46:30 +0100 (MET) | 
 |    From: R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl (Rogier Wolff) | 
 |  | 
 |    Lately, while trying to recover a broken disk, my system froze (twice, | 
 |    until I tried something else) while copying the disk. | 
 |  | 
 |    So I had a file of about 50Mb that was growing frantically at the | 
 |    moment of the crash. | 
 |  | 
 |    e2fsck, then finds an indirect block that is completely bogus. It | 
 |    starts by asking me if it's ok to clear a few of the referenced | 
 |    blocks. I say yes. Then it comes to the conclusion:  | 
 |  | 
 |       too many invalid blocks. Clear inode? | 
 |  | 
 |    and then I get the option to delete the whole file. Not to truncate | 
 |    the file to a "working" size. | 
 |  | 
 |  | 
 |    I'd MUCH rather have e2fsck say something like: | 
 |  | 
 |       inode 1234 references an invalid block 134345454. Hmm. | 
 |       inode 1234 references 567 out of 50176 invalid blocks,  | 
 | 			  all near the end. Truncate file to 49152 blocks? | 
 |  | 
 |    Here you can see that of the 1024 blocks near the end of the file, | 
 |    only 567 were detected as invalid. However now 48Mb of the file will | 
 |    be recovered, instead of thrown away. | 
 |  | 
 | That's a good point.  Actually, the right thing is for e2fsck to offer | 
 | to clear all of the bad blocks in a particular indirect block.  I don't | 
 | know how hard it would be to do that, but I'll put it on my e2fsprogs | 
 | TODO list. | 
 |  | 
 | 							- Ted | 
 |  | 
 | --------------------------------------------------------------- | 
 | From e2fsprogs Debian TODO file as of 1.10-13. | 
 |  | 
 | * Maybe make -dbg packages. Look at how others do it. | 
 |  | 
 | --------------------------------------------------------------- | 
 |  | 
 | Add --lba option to debian icheck command, and have ways of making it | 
 | easier to translate LBA to filesystem block numbers. | 
 |  | 
 | ------------------------------------------------------- | 
 |  | 
 |  | 
 |  | 
 | List of projects for e2fsprogs: | 
 |  | 
 |  | 
 | 1) Make debugfs's "ncheck <inode>" command list all of the pathnames | 
 | to an inode, not just only the first link to the inode which is found. | 
 | (A good "intro to libext2fs programming interfaces project) | 
 |  | 
 | 	Difficulty: Low		Priority: Low | 
 |  | 
 | 2) Use a code coverage tool such as Rational's PureCoverage to see | 
 | what kind of code coverage we have for e2fsck, and try to add test | 
 | cases to increase the code coverage for e2fsck. | 
 |  | 
 | 	Difficulty: Medium	Priorty: Low | 
 |  | 
 | 3) Use a code coverage tool such as Rational's PureCoverage to see | 
 | what kind of code coverage we have for resize2fs, and try to add test | 
 | cases to increase the code coverage for resize2fs. | 
 |  | 
 | 	Difficulty: Medium	Priorty: Medium | 
 |  | 
 | 4) Create a new I/O manager (i.e., test_io.c, unix_io.c, et.al.) which | 
 | layers on top of an existing I/O manager which provides copy-on-write | 
 | functionality.  This COW I/O manager takes will take two open I/O | 
 | managers, call them "base" and "changed".  The "base" I/O manager is | 
 | opened read/only, so any changes are written instead to the "changed" | 
 | I/O manager, in a compact, non-sparse format containing the intended | 
 | modification to the "base" filesystem.   | 
 |  | 
 | This will allow resize2fs to figure out what changes need to made to | 
 | extend a filesystem, or expand the size of inodes in the inode table, | 
 | and the changes can be pushed the filesystem in one fell swoop.  (If | 
 | the system crashes; the program which runs the "changed" file can be | 
 | re-run, much like a journal replay.  My assumption is that the COW | 
 | file will contain the filesystem UUID in a the COW superblock, and the | 
 | COW file will be stored in some place such as /var/state/e2fsprogs, | 
 | with an init.d file to automate the replay so we can recover cleanly | 
 | from a crash during the resize2fs process.) | 
 |  | 
 | 	Difficulty: Medium	Priority: Medium | 
 |  | 
 | 5) Create a new I/O manager (i.e., test_io.c, unix_io.c, et.al.) which | 
 | layers on top of an existing I/O manager which provides an "undo" | 
 | functionality.  This undo I/O manager takes will take two open I/O | 
 | managers, call them "base" and "undo".  The "base" I/O manager is be | 
 | opened read/write, and when any writes are sent to the I/O manager, | 
 | the I/O manager will check the "undo" I/O manager, using a file format | 
 | identical to the one found in (5) above.   | 
 |  | 
 | This is useful for allowing e2fsck to create an "undo" file, which | 
 | would make things like "e2fsck -y" much safer. | 
 |  | 
 | 	Difficulty: Low (once 5 is done)  Priority: Low | 
 |  | 
 | 6) Modify resize2fs so that it can relocate and reorganize the | 
 | filesystem in the following ways: (1) increase the inode size, so that | 
 | an existing filesystem can use the EA-in-inode kernel patch, (2) | 
 | reserve blocks in the resize inode to allow for on-line resizing.  Use | 
 | the COW I/O manager described in (5) in order to provide robustness in | 
 | case of a crash during the resize/reorganization operation.   | 
 |  | 
 | 	Difficulty: High	Priority: Medium | 
 |  | 
 | 7) Review the EA-in-inode patches to e2fsck for correctness/code | 
 | cleanliness.  (I will probably have to do this myself -- Ted) | 
 |  | 
 | 	Difficulty: High	Priorty: Medium | 
 |  | 
 | 8) Add support for extent maps to e2fsprogs.  I need to review the | 
 | extent maps first/in parallel.  | 
 |  | 
 | 	Difficulty: High	Priority: Medium | 
 |  | 
 | ---------------------------------- | 
 |  | 
 | Need to deal with the case where the resize inode overlaps with the | 
 | bad blocks inode. | 
 |  |