palo not working on ext2/ext3 partitions

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

I recently had the pleasure of a complete reinstall and found that I
can't set up palo on the new system (at least not palo that loads from
an ext2/ext3 filesystem).  The problem doesn't seem to be within palo
itself, but the fact that mke2fs is no longer working for us.  The
symptom I see is that after a couple of uses the palo partition
corrupts itself and then e2fsck destroys the iplboot stored in the
badblocks list.

The problem seems to be with the badblock list because if I do

palo -I /dev/sdb

Followed by a fsck -f on the palo partition, it finds errors and wants
to clear the badblock inode.

I can reproduce this simply by doing

dd if=/dev/zero of=bbtest.img bs=1M count=100
losetup /dev/loop0 bbtest.img
a=237; while [ $a -le 450 ]; do echo $a >> bblist.txt; a=$[$a+1]; done
mke2fs -b 1024 -l /home/jejb/bblist.txt  /dev/loop0
e2fsck -f /dev/loop0

With no palo involvement, so I don't think it's our fault.

I'll take this to the ext2 tools development list.  Whatever it is
seems to be really old because I unearthed an mke2fs from 2011 that
still has the problem.

James