Comment 6 for bug 530071

On Mar 11, 2010, at 8:30 AM, Colin Watson wrote:
> So, for the most part this is all obviously sensible. The installer can
> and should create partitions with optimal alignment (and I've made that
> change, pending testing), and it makes complete sense for mkfs.ext4 to
> complain when you do something that will result in poor performance.
>
> The bit that is a little bit awkward is this: imagine that you take an
> existing partition which was created before we fixed the partitioner to
> deal with optimal alignment, and try to overwrite it with a new ext4
> filesystem (which may seem to be a perfectly reasonable action to a user
> unfamiliar with the minutiae of logical sector sizes). mkfs.ext4 will
> complain in the manner you describe, and there seems to be no
> straightforward way to force it to proceed anyway (short of 'yes | ...',
> which I don't think is acceptable!). We should probably implement the
> same check in the partitioner when we're about to create a new
> filesystem, but if the user says that they don't want to move the start
> of the filesystem, what are we to do? Ideally we'd be able to run
> mkfs.ext4 under the covers with a "yes, I know, just get on with it"
> option.
>
> Ted, would you be willing to make the alignment warning here overridable
> using a command-line option?

Eric Sandeen has already sent me a patch to do this via the -F option. It will be in e2fsprogs 1.41.11, which will be out Real Soon Now (e2fsprogs 1.41.10 has this unfortunate problem where e2fsck -D corrupts file systems...)

-- Ted