Consider replacing e2fsprogs with diskfs/go-diskfs

[ssttevee]

I was just wondering if there is some necessity to use e2fsprogs instead of a pure go solution like diskfs/go-diskfs.

Additionally, I'd be down to work on an implementation if it is desirable.

[stapelberg]

The last time I looked at go-diskfs, it didn’t have the ext4 file system creation code :)

It’s probably possible to use that code, but how confident are we that it works correctly and that issues will be investigated and fixed? Does any other project or deployment use go-diskfs to create ext4 file systems?

[ssttevee]

I've personally used it for a handful of projects and I haven't run into any problems.

After a quick search, here short list of notable projects that use go-diskfs: exoscale, linuxkit, ubuntu-image, openshift

However since there is some concern, it might be better publish it as an experimental mode, perhaps as a build tag or separate branch.

[stapelberg]

Thank you for the research. However, these projects only use go-diskfs’s partition table handling code. I wrote the partition table handling code for gokrazy, so I can say that this is much less complex than creating a modern file system :). I was particularly interested in usages of the go-diskfs’s ext4 creation code.

However since there is some concern, it might be better publish it as an experimental mode, perhaps as a build tag or separate branch.

Yeah, maybe the easiest option would be to just have a command-line flag that selects which implementation (e2fsprogs or go-diskfs) should be used. Then, we can easily try it out on non-critical installations and eventually change the default if we make good experiences.