Bug 14478

Summary: Small ext4 filesystems are not Y2038 compliant
Product: [Build System, Metadata & Runtime] OE-Core Reporter: Ross Burton <ross.burton>
Component: deploymentAssignee: Ross Burton <ross.burton>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: Medium CC: randy.macleod
Version: 4.0   
Target Milestone: 3.4   
Hardware: x86   
OS: Multiple   
Whiteboard:
OS type for building Yocto: --- Type of Regression: ---
Verified: Documentation change: No (bug/feature does not impact docs)

Description Ross Burton 2021-07-09 18:14:12 UTC 
A bare ext4 image (not wic) that is less than 512MB uses small (128 bit) inodes instead of normal (256 bit), which means that they don't support 64-bit timestamps.

For wic this was fixed in oe-core eecbe625558406680121d2a7e84917fea45ea9dc by passing -T default to mkfs, which forced all partitions to be the default type and never "small".

We should maybe do the same for normal ext4 images, or alternatively just drop the size of 'small' to say 50MB.
Comment 1 Randy MacLeod 2021-07-15 14:40:15 UTC 
To get the ball rolling, we should just send a patch making this change to the email list and see who objects. If someone really needs a smaller FS, they can revert the change.
Comment 2 Ross Burton 2021-07-16 12:24:51 UTC 
Patch on the list.
Comment 3 Ross Burton 2021-10-07 11:46:10 UTC 
Fixed in oe-core 9ab0ae83a24ee99e69f8ac54256b253a122aef8a.