[parisc-linux] Allow palo partition to be mounted as ext2

[James Bottomley]

On Fri, 2003-11-07 at 22:12, M. Grabert wrote:
> I don't know much ext2/3 details, but is there a way that a fsck
> could mess things up? Eg. not an ordinary fsck, but if the user
> runs it manually with special options?

Not fsck, no.  The bad blocks are treated as though they belonged to an
invisible file.  redoing the mke2fs, of course, would destroy the
bootability.

> I suppose the same technique could be also used for other filesystems
> palo supports (in the future).

As long as they have bad block support, yes---that's not a given;
reiserfs doesn't seem to have it, for instance.

Also, since the command has to be run by palo and palo has to know how
to format the bad block list, it's not trivial to do.

However, the ultimate argument is because palo's iplboot loader only
knows about ext2/3, even if you could format the partition as anything
else, you currently wouldn't be able to boot from it.

James