On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 06:11:55PM +0400, Eugene Crosser wrote: > I have a board based on PLX7821 aka OX820 ARM SoC. It is not > supported in the mainline kernel; the vendor supplied the source of > the kernel 2.6.31 with necessary updates for this platform, and it > works. I understand that there have been no successful attempts to > bring support of this platform to newer kernels. > I would like to use btrfs on this system, but it is labelled > "experimental" in the kernel. My question is: is it "safe" to use > btrfs as it is in 2.6.31? In other words, where there "data > destroying" bugs found and fixed since then? If the answer is yes, > then is it possible (and how difficult) to compile newer btrfs code > against this kernel, or backport the fixes? 2.6.31 is *insanely* old in btrfs terms, and definitely contains serious filesystem-corrupting bugs that have been fixed since. You should be looking at running 3.7 (right now) or 3.8-rc1 (when that comes out next week), from a btrfs point of view. I really wouldn't recommend running the btrfs code from 2.6.31. Backporting current btrfs code to a kernel that old is likely to be a difficult proposition, simply because other things (in the VFS and block layers) will have changed underneath it. Similarly, if the patches for your board haven't been updated as the kernel progressed, you're going to have a hard time forward-porting them. Given the option of where to put in the work, I'd recommend forward-porting the hardware support to a more recent kernel, and getting that pushed to mainline, as it's more likely to be useful in the future, and useful to more people. Hugo. -- === Hugo Mills: hugo@... carfax.org.uk | darksatanic.net | lug.org.uk === PGP key: 515C238D from wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net or http://www.carfax.org.uk --- Our so-called leaders speak/with words they try to jail ya/ --- They subjugate the meek/but it's the rhetoric of failure.
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