A change has been made in the codebase forming the Linux kernel 6.9, which reclassifies the Ext2 filesystem driver from supported to deprecated. The reason mentioned is that the driver only supports 32-bit time counters in inodes, which will overflow on January 19, 2038.
Instead of the ext2 driver, users are encouraged to use the ext4 driver, which supports working with the Ext2 filesystem and is fully compatible with it, but can also use timestamps in ext2 partitions that are not affected by the 2038 problem, provided that the filesystem is created with inodes larger than 255 bytes (in the ext2 driver, 32-bit time counters were used regardless of the inode size).
Ext2 users are advised to check the inode size being used. The mkfs.ext2 utility has been switched to using 256-byte inodes by default starting with version 1.46.5 (supplied in Ubuntu 22.04); prior to this, to increase the inode size, one could use the command 'mkfs.ext2 -I 256'. If 128-byte inodes are used, they should be converted to 256-byte ones: $ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/sda1 | grep 'Inode size' Inode size: 128 $ sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sda1 $ sudo tune2fs -I 256 /dev/sda1
According to Theodore Ts'o, the creator of Ext2/3/4 filesystems, if anyone finds the ext2 driver lacking due to its simplicity (for instance, to conserve resources in embedded systems), there is still time to add support for 64-bit time counters to it, which wouldn’t be too difficult.
Source: opennet.ru
