[FEATURE PROPOSAL] Ext2 support

Hello /e/ community, I think it would be nice to have Ext2 support in the kernel, this way we would be able to install /e/ without degrading the memory, and for sd cards goes the same

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you say so because ext4 writes a journal?

As ext4 system partitions are mounted read-only, I’m unsure if it is a factor. /cache and /persist are mounted rw on my device… so maybe some journal writes happen. /data is most likely a f2fs partition, so already nand/flash friendly.

Did you ever run into wear-leveling related issues on the device eMMC?

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I’m not sure about what wear-leveling means, but, f2fs is incompatible with /e/, my usb wasn’t working, and I had to backup my data on my pc and then format it in Fat32. f2fs its disabled by default on Lineage for MicroG, LineageOS actually supports it, so it shouldn’t be a problem to enable it, I used a Magisk module that enabled some incompatible FSs in the past with Android 8, but I can’t make it work on /e/-R

wear-levelling is synonymous with what you meant by “without degrading memory”, or what does it mean to you?

Open an adb shell and run cat /proc/filesystems to see what your kernel can mount.

f2fs might not be used with the sdcard maybe, should be exFAT, but depending on device kernel it is actively used for /data, at least the fstab of the device I use (moto harpia).

I think, but never tried, that you can use parted to set an sdcard to f2fs instead of exfat. I think from your initial question sdcard lifetime is your primary motivation?

I support this as I want to use a ext2 on my external card of my FP3 to overcome the limitations of FAT32. My FP3 can “see” cards formatted to FAT32 and to ext2 but seems to treat them differently for no apparent reason.

I use AnkiDroid, which puts all its media files in one directory and I have hit the file limit in FAT32. running: cat /proc/filesystems from an adb shell yields:

nodev sysfs
nodev rootfs
nodev ramfs
nodev bdev
nodev proc
nodev cpuset
nodev cgroup
nodev cgroup2
nodev tmpfs
nodev configfs
nodev debugfs
nodev tracefs
nodev sockfs
nodev bpf
nodev pipefs
nodev devpts
ext3
ext2
ext4
vfat
nodev sdcardfs
fuseblk
nodev fuse
nodev fusectl
f2fs
nodev selinuxfs
nodev functionfs

so I would expect that I could use an SD card formatted to ext2. While the phone can “see” the card and I can access it using root mode in Ghost Commander, but I can’t get AnkiDroid to access it.

This is really frustrating and I will have to give up on e/os if I can’t find a solution.

I was naive, supporting a different filesystem than exfat for external storage needs more than kernel support. See the thread Request for linux users: Please give the possibility to use sd-card with ext4 - #4 by AnotherElk for links to lineages gitlab on how vold can do ext4 - ext2 would be similar

Thanks for the links. I have found a work around for my problem with AnkiDroid. It is not really satisfactory but will have to do until the file system issue is resolved.