Documentation on ext3?

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu (dsr at tao.merseine.nu)]

On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 08:02:55PM +0000, John Chambers wrote:
>    ext3   is a journaling version of the ext2 filesystem. It is easy to
>           switch back and forth between ext2 and ext3.
> 
> This isn't very helpful.  If you don't know how to do it right, being
> told  that  it's  easy  is  not  very helpful.  In the RH systems I'm
> dealing with, I've found nothing further on the topic.

You convert an ext2 to an ext3 by using the tune2fs command to add a
journalling option, then remounting the filesystem.

You convert an ext3 back to an ext2 by mounting it explicitly as an
ext2, which will invalidate the journal.

> It found nothing, so these aren't started by the  rc  scripts.   I've
> also  tried this with / instead of /etc/, but that will take a couple
> of days to complete.
> 
> Another curiosity is that kill -9 has no effect on  these  processes.
> (All this was done as root, of course.)
> 
> So does anyone know where all this might be documented?  There  seems
> to be some very non-unix-like behaviour in all this.

the k*d processes are kernel processes which are accounted for
separately from the kernel proper. However, the code for them is
entirely within the kernel itself.

kupdated flushes dirty blocks from the caches. Tune it in
/proc/sys/vm/bdflush.

http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/FAQs/ext3-faq.html

-dsr-

-- 
Network engineer looking for work in Boston area.
Resume at http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr/