ext4: 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.ext4 -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] EXT4-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 <sandeen@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Carlos Maiolino <cmaiolino@redhat.com>
This commit is contained in:
Eric Sandeen
2013-08-28 19:05:07 -04:00
committed by Theodore Ts'o
parent bdfb6ff4a2
commit ad4eec6135
2 changed files with 48 additions and 6 deletions

View File

@@ -144,11 +144,12 @@ journal_async_commit Commit block can be written to disk without waiting
mount the device. This will enable 'journal_checksum'
internally.
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
noload if the filesystem was not unmounted cleanly,