Help : e2fsprogs

[MirJafar Ali]

Hello,

Hope you will forgive me for asking some very simple question about
e2fsprogs. I am very new to the kernel as
well as file system programming.

My task is to collect superblock, inode, bitmap ( or free list)  information
from ext2/ext3 filesysteam. After searching
the google, I came to know about e2fsprogs, which I was able to install and
use at least "dumpe2fs" utility. This
utility do not provide timestamp of each allocated inode and I am thinking
of modifying source code of e2fsprogs.

My two questions are:

1.   Is it correct to use "dumpe2fs" program and modify for timestamp ?
2.   I could not understand the main purpose of e2fsprogs. Am I correct to
assume that this program extract information
     from the existing ext2/ext3 filesystem. Why there are ext2_inode
datastructure defined in these programs ? Why couldn't
     these programs read existing datastructures of inode ?
3.  Are these user level or kernel level programs ?
4.  I want to have my own policies of allocatiing datablocks in some
cylinder group instead of using ext2 default policy ? What
    should I do for that ?

I know, these must be silly questions, but I will learn from your response.


Mir.
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