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authorKees Cook <kees+treewide@kernel.org>2026-09-02 15:31:14 -0700
committerKees Cook <kees@kernel.org>2026-09-04 21:37:00 -0700
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treec65086f9bdcd48c6360fb7cb4598bca084da1f32 /Documentation/filesystems/ext4/about.rst
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treewide: refresh kmalloc_obj() conversionsgrafted
This is another run of the Coccinelle script for converting kmalloc() family of allocations to kmalloc_obj() via the existing rules in scripts/coccinelle/api/kmalloc_objs.cocci This catches both the set of kmalloc() uses added since the first kmalloc_obj() conversions in v7.0 and adds a large group missed in the first pass due to Coccinelle not interacting well with the cleanup.h scoped_...() family of macros[1]. I worked around this with spatch's "--macro-file" argument to a file with all the scoped_...() macros mapped to Coccinelle's YACFE_ITERATOR[2] as that was the closest viable control flow indicator I could find. Build tested allmodconfig on x86, arm64, arm, loongarch, mips, powerpc, riscv, and s390 with no new warnings. Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/202609021314.8A9C0B8@keescook/ [1] Link: https://github.com/coccinelle/coccinelle/blob/master/standard.h [2] Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <kees+treewide@kernel.org>
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+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+About this Book
+===============
+
+This document attempts to describe the on-disk format for ext4
+filesystems. The same general ideas should apply to ext2/3 filesystems
+as well, though they do not support all the features that ext4 supports,
+and the fields will be shorter.
+
+**NOTE**: This is a work in progress, based on notes that the author
+(djwong) made while picking apart a filesystem by hand. The data
+structure definitions should be current as of Linux 4.18 and
+e2fsprogs-1.44. All comments and corrections are welcome, since there is
+undoubtedly plenty of lore that might not be reflected in freshly
+created demonstration filesystems.
+
+License
+-------
+This book is licensed under the terms of the GNU Public License, v2.
+
+Terminology
+-----------
+
+ext4 divides a storage device into an array of logical blocks both to
+reduce bookkeeping overhead and to increase throughput by forcing larger
+transfer sizes. Generally, the block size will be 4KiB (the same size as
+pages on x86 and the block layer's default block size), though the
+actual size is calculated as 2 ^ (10 + ``sb.s_log_block_size``) bytes.
+Throughout this document, disk locations are given in terms of these
+logical blocks, not raw LBAs, and not 1024-byte blocks. For the sake of
+convenience, the logical block size will be referred to as
+``$block_size`` throughout the rest of the document.
+
+When referenced in ``preformatted text`` blocks, ``sb`` refers to fields
+in the super block, and ``inode`` refers to fields in an inode table
+entry.
+
+Other References
+----------------
+
+Also see https://www.nongnu.org/ext2-doc/ for quite a collection of
+information about ext2/3. Here's another old reference:
+http://wiki.osdev.org/Ext2