Casefold in EXT4 Installs

Lounge EndeavourOS development
1

Hey guys, I’m curious if you would be interested in adding the “casefold” feature in new installs using EXT4 (or make it a toggle-able option?). This is a feature which allows a user to make specific directories case-insensitive like Windows, improving compatibility when installing mods for games and overwriting files. The reason I ask is because it is necessary to include the feature when making the filesystem, you cannot add it later. So if you want it on your root filesystem you have to re-install EOS. Enabling this feature does not change anything itself, it just gives you the option the to run the command in the future if you want.

See this guide for more info: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/08/27/using-the-linux-kernel-case-insensitive-feature-in-ext4/

“To enable the feature, it takes two steps: one is to enable the filesystem-wide casefold feature on the volume’s superblock. This doesn’t immediately make any directories case-insensitive, so don’t worry, but it prepares the disk to support casefolded directories. It also configures what encoding will be used.”

If not, I’m curious how I would go about doing this myself on a clean install (not that I’m planning on one soon lol). Would it just be adding this mkfs -t ext4 -O casefold to the calamares options somewhere?

2

That would be somewhat problematic since not all kernels support it. If we enable it in the installer and then someone switches to a different kernel, they might not be able to load their filesystem.

3

That’s fair, makes sense. I’m not sure why someone would do that but to avoid potential problems I guess it’s best not to enable it, at least by default.

1 Like
4

You might want to try it in a VM? Haven’t tested it but creating the partition before calamares starts and then selecting manual partitioning in calamares might just work.

5

True, I haven’t done manual partitioning for installs before but that could be good to learn