I've just got a new SD card; is there any reason why I shouldn't choose ext2 as the filesystem type for it, as opposed to VFAT?

The advantages of ext2 would be that it can host symlinks, uid/gid, etc, etc.

The downside of ext2 would be that it does't get automounted, but I can work around that, by putting it in /etc/fstab, and I imagine by forceloading the mbcache and ext2 kernel modules, right?

I run Linux on my other systems here; the card would never be put into a Windows system.

Any other issues to consider?

thanks much for any comments...

This is just my own personal experience....

I bought a 8GB mini SDHC card for my N810. The card seemed to work just fine when placed in the tablet. However, if the card was present when the device booted, the OS would never start..... That is, it'd hang on the starting screen.

Once I took it out, started the device up, put it back in, and formatted it as ext2, everything now works fine....

thanks much; did you need to do anything to forceload the mbcache and ext2 kernel modules, and add fstab entries?

i'm also adding "noatime" to the fstab entry for it.

to answer my own question: no, it seems that it's not necessary to force loading of the kernel modules. If the device is in fstab, and marked for mounting at boot, then the modules will get loaded.

In fact, having an ext2 fs in /etc/fstab also seems to cause the ext3 and jbd modules to be loaded, even though they're not needed.

edit: perhaps it's not related to /etc/fstab, though, as my ext fs has been mounted elsewhere than my /etc/fstab dictated, and with different options (e.g. not with noatime). So it seems that there is something mounting SD cards under /media despite them being explicitly listed in /etc/fstab. Sigh.

edit: quickest answer to get noatime was to edit /usr/sbin/osso-mmc-mount.sh and insert it:

if install_module $KERNEL_VERSION ext2; then
mount -t ext2 -o noatime $PDEV $MP > /dev/null

and now it gets mounted automatically with the noatime option:

/dev/mmcblk0p1 on /media/mmc2 type ext2 (rw,noatime)

ah, that's much better

Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p1 7852224 3294760 4158592 44% /media/mmc2
/dev/mmcblk1p1 7336144 170260 6793228 2% /media/mmc1
/dev/mmcblk1p2 507748 281845 199689 59% /mnt/clone

/dev/mmcblk0p1 on /media/mmc2 type ext2 (rw,noatime)
/dev/mmcblk1p1 on /media/mmc1 type ext2 (rw,noatime)
/dev/mmcblk1p2 on /mnt/clone type ext2 (ro)