GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 738706
GParted doesn't support ext4 on RHEL/CentOS 5.x
Last modified: 2015-01-26 18:25:31 UTC
RHEL / CentOS 5.6 and later officially support ext4 file system [1]. From RHEL / CentOS 5.3, ext4 file system was included as a technology preview. In all RHEL / CentOS 5.x releases the standard e2fsprogs package is based on 1.39 which doesn't have ext4 support. So Red Hat introduced a package named e4fsprogs based on e2fsprogs 1.41, which does support ext4. This also necessitated using unique names: debuge4fs, dumpe4fs, e4fsck, e4image, etc. As GParted only uses the standard names: debuge2fs, dumpe2fs, etc it doesn't properly support ext4 file systems on RHEL / CentOS 5.x. It reports the following messages against an ext4 partition and fails when trying to modify the partition with equivalent messages: e2label: Filesystem has unsupported features(s) while trying to open /dev/sdb3 Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock. dumpe2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006) dumpe2fs: Filesystem has unsupported feature(s) while trying to open /dev/sdb3 Unable to read the contents of this file system! Because of this some operations may be unavailable. The cause might be a missing software package. The following list of software packages is required for ext4 file system support: e2fsprogs v1.41+. Found this because I am trying to get GParted updated in EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) 5 and 6 [2]. Thanks, Mike [1] RHEL 5.6 Release Notes, 5. Filesystems and Storage https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/5.6_Release_Notes/ar01s05.html [2] Red Hat Bugzilla 1133315 - Update to latest GParted in EL5 and EL6 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1133315
Created attachment 288837 [details] [review] Check for e4fsprogs commands (v1) Hi Curtis, Here's the fix for this. I've tested this successfully on CentOS 5.11, CentOS 6.5 and Fedora Rawhide (22). Tested both ext3 and ext4. Tests were: 1) Create 2) Label 3) Check 4) New UUID 5) Move Correct tools were used. (e2fsprogs everywhere except e4fsprogs on CentOS 5.11 for ext4 only). Thanks, Mike
Thank you Mike for the patch set to improve backward compatibility with CentOS. I performed the five steps outlined in comment #1 using ext2 and ext4 on Kubuntu 12.04 and openSUSE 13.1 and all tests were successful. This means that my regression testing passed and no new bugs were introduced. The patch in comment #1 has been committed to the GNOME repository for inclusion in the next release of GParted. The relevant git commit can be viewed at the following link: Check for e4fsprogs commands for ext4 support on RHEL/CentOS 5.x (#738706) https://git.gnome.org/browse/gparted/commit/?id=f672f68863d36972c5fb28d6592e47ca790708dd
This enhancement was included in the GParted 0.21.0 release on January 26, 2015.