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:
# 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
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>