I note that Jeff's uBoot environment explicitly sets the root filesystem file type to
ext2. This is probably not a bad choice when the file system is on a thumb drive --
ext3 file systems generally require more disk writes than
ext2 ones. However, now that I'm booting from an HD, I find it desirable to convert to ext3. ext3 file systems are in general more robust in the face of power-fail type interruptions, and with an HD, minimizing disk writes is not a problem.
One problem is that, even though I provide an ext3 root file system, the uBoot instructs Debian to mount it as an ext2. This causes no harm; it just bypasses the logging that was added for ext3.
So, today, I delved into the uBoot environment and removed the
usb_rootfstype=ext2 environment variable. My Dockstar now boots into an ext3 file system and is apparently running fine on it. I elected to elide this environment variable instead of explicitly changing it to ext3 so as to be able to boot off my old thumb drives, with their ext2 root partitions, without changing the environment.
In any event, I thought others might find this of interest, and if anyone knows why Jeff explicitly set the rootfstype to ext2 when he devised his uboot environment, I'd be interested in hearing the story, along with any "cons" that may be associated with the transition.