Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7 [LWN.net]

Red Hat has announced the release of RHEL 4.7. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 is now marching toward the Production 2 life cycle phase - formerly known as the 'Transition' or 'Deployment' phase. From this point forward, the amount of change introduced for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 minor releases is decreasing constantly as Red Hat focuses its efforts on addressing continued stabilization of the release." New stuff includes Firefox 3, a new intrusion detection package, "SystemTap production support," and more. See the release notes for details.

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7

Posted Jul 27, 2008 23:36 UTC (Sun) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

The biggest surprise to me is in the known issues section where they state that an issue has
been found with ext3 and disk quotas... that they don't recommend using quotas on ext3 file
systems... and that they have no plans to fix it in the 2.6.9-x kernel RHEL 4 is based on...
because the fix would be to intrusive.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7

Posted Jul 28, 2008 2:41 UTC (Mon) by mrons (subscriber, #1751) [Link]

Thanks for pointing that out. That is a surprise.

I wonder which filesystem you are supposed to use with quotas then? I thought ext3 was the
filesystem of choice for Red Hat systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7

Posted Jul 29, 2008 9:10 UTC (Tue) by barryn (subscriber, #5996) [Link]

FWIW, according to the known issues in the release notes:

Red Hat discourages the use of quota on EXT3 file systems. This is because in some cases, doing so can cause a deadlock.
Testing has revealed that kjournald can sometimes block some EXT3-specific callouts that are used when quota is running. As such, Red Hat does not plan to fix this issue in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, as the modifications required would be too invasive.
Note that this issue is not present in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.