ext4: allow specifying external journal by pathname mount option

It's always been a hassle that if an external journal's
device number changes, the filesystem won't mount.
And since boot-time enumeration can change, device number
changes aren't unusual.

The current mechanism to update the journal location is by
passing in a mount option w/ a new devnum, but that's a hassle;
it's a manual approach, fixing things after the fact.

Adding a mount option, "-o journal_path=/dev/$DEVICE" would
help, since then we can do i.e.

# mount -o journal_path=/dev/disk/by-label/$JOURNAL_LABEL ...

and it'll mount even if the devnum has changed, as shown here:

# losetup /dev/loop0 journalfile
# mke2fs -L mylabel-journal -O journal_dev /dev/loop0 
# mkfs.ext4 -L mylabel -J device=/dev/loop0 /dev/sdb1

Change the journal device number:

# losetup -d /dev/loop0
# losetup /dev/loop1 journalfile 

And today it will fail:

# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/test
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

# dmesg | tail -n 1
[17343.240702] EXT4-fs (sdb1): error: couldn't read superblock of external journal

But with this new mount option, we can specify the new path:

# mount -o journal_path=/dev/loop1 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/test
#

(which does update the encoded device number, incidentally):

# umount /dev/sdb1
# dumpe2fs -h /dev/sdb1 | grep "Journal device"
dumpe2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
Journal device:	          0x0701

But best of all we can just always mount by journal-path, and
it'll always work:

# mount -o journal_path=/dev/disk/by-label/mylabel-journal /dev/sdb1 /mnt/test
#

So the journal_path option can be specified in fstab, and as long as
the disk is available somewhere, and findable by label (or by UUID),
we can mount.

Signed-off-by: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Carlos Maiolino <cmaiolino@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt
index f7cbf57..b91cfaa 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt
@@ -144,11 +144,12 @@ journal_async_commit	Commit block can be written to disk without waiting
 			mount the device. This will enable 'journal_checksum'
 			internally.
 
+journal_path=path
 journal_dev=devnum	When the external journal device's major/minor numbers
-			have changed, this option allows the user to specify
+			have changed, these options allow the user to specify
 			the new journal location.  The journal device is
-			identified through its new major/minor numbers encoded
-			in devnum.
+			identified through either its new major/minor numbers
+			encoded in devnum, or via a path to the device.
 
 norecovery		Don't load the journal on mounting.  Note that
 noload			if the filesystem was not unmounted cleanly,