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authorDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-27 10:05:51 +0000
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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