[Lustre-discuss] inode size with mkfs

[Stuart Midgley]

After installing e2fsprogs-1.41.6.sun1-0redhat it appears the default inode size for ext file systems changes from 128 to 256 (see /etc/mke2fs.conf).  This caused us several days of "head scratching" as we were trying to figure out why grub wouldn't work on our oss's where we had this package installed.

To resolve the issue, we had to build our /boot partition with

   mkfs.ext2 -I 128 ...

which set the inode size back to 128 for this partition and grub was happy again.

So... why was it changed as the default for ALL ext file systems?  Surely, an entry could have been put in for lustre with the correct settings?  ie. mkfs.ext3 -T lustre ....

Stopping something as fundamental as grub from working doesn't seem like a good thing for a package to do.


-- 
Dr Stuart Midgley
sdm900 at gmail.com