Re: new e2fstools and parted not playing nice?

[Andrew Clausen]

On Thu, Oct 28, 2004 at 03:13:19PM +0200, B.Hakvoort wrote:
> The problem is, a lot of us are willing to dedicate time to this, but
> don't have the slightest idea where to start.
> So it would take us 2 weeks only to understand the code, not to mention
> fix it.
>
> Do you know of some documentation which explains the ext2/3 filesystem
> in-depth?

First, I recommend "The Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD" by
McKusick, Bostic, Karels and Quarterman.  It is a great introduction
to operating systems in general, so you wouldn't be wasting your
money.

Second, you might find www.nongnu.org/ext2-doc/ext2.html helpful.

> Or maybe you can tell us something more about the current
> problems and in which functions/files we have to look into.

The problem is summarized in ext2_determine_itoffset().
There are several magic numbers in there that say that the
ext2 resizer requires the block bitmap to start 2 blocks before
the inode table in sparse groups, and so on.

Cheers,
Andrew