It’s the ext2 filesystem driver that will be marked as deprecated in the upcoming 6.9 Linux kernel. The main issue is that even if the filesystem is created with 256 byte inodes (
↫ Michael Opdenackermkfs.ext2 -I 256), the filesystem driver will stick to 32 bit dates. Because of this, the driver does not support inode timestamps beyond 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.
Kernel developer Ted T’so did state that if someone wants to add support for 64bit dates to ext2, it shouldn’t be too hard. I doubt many people still use ext2, but if someone is willing to step up, the deprecation can be made undone by adding this support.
I haven’t used ext2 in years, but I was under the impression the ext3/4 driver is used to mount ext2 file systems as well.
The ext4 driver can mount ext2 filesystems, and that is the recommended workflow.
I’m honestly surprised the ext2 driver is still around. I thought it evolved into ext3 then ext4.
Yes, ext3/4 offer backwards compatibility with ext2.
I would have been surprised if there were any maintainers working on pure ext2 at this point.
Other files systems, like ReiserFS (good riddance) are also getting the chop block from the tree.