Hey folks, after the EA changes are in current now and all tests look good, we can finally move on and branch for netbsd-10. Proposed date is next wednsday.
We have quite a few things to finish before the final release, but this gets things moving - and I hope it will not take more than three months to get the release out of the door. Before the branch one final issue needs to be decided, and I would like to solicit your feedback on this: With the new EA-enabled variant of FFSv2 (see https://wiki.netbsd.org/features/UFS2ea/ for details) we have the choice to use ACLs and EAs on FFS file systems - which makes them incompatible with all prior releases and other operating systems - or to forbid them. The installer offers upto three options for FFS file systems: - FFSv1, typically only used with bootloaders that did not get FFSv2 support yet or firmware that loads the kernel directly (examples: mac68k or shark). - FFSv2, compatible with older releases but not supporting EAs/ACLs. In read-only mode partly compatible with other operating systems. - FFSv2ea, with full support for EAs and ACLs, but incompatible with all prior NetBSD releases and all other operating systems (the file system superblock has a different magic number, so will be rejected by older code). Currently the installer defaults to creating FFSv2ea file systems for new installations, so if you do intend to share a partition with older NetBSD kernels, be sure to change the filesystem type. This will require a good description in the release notes, and probably more extensions to the wiki page pointed to above. Now the question: should the default install really use this new FFS type, or should it default to plain FFSv2? The change is trivial and from my PoV both choices have serious downsides: - unaware users may install FFSv2ea file systems and later find the need to access them from older NetBSD kernels. "Downgrading" them is quite easy using the ufs2ea-flip tool mentioned in the wiki page, but it is not "plug & play". - if FFSv2ea is not the default, most new installs will create non-EA enabled file systems and - the EAs will not get much testing - packets from pkgsrc (like samba) will continue to have the corresponding options disabled by default - users will have a hard time to find the conversion options later. It is hidden in fsck_ffs(8) and quite simple: after having made sure your bootloader is up to date, boot to single user and run something like: "fsck_ffs -c ea /" So, what should be the default FFS type for new installs in netbsd-10 ? Martin
