On 2011-12-05, at 9:33, Ted Ts'o [off-list ref] wrote:

Note: it's strictly speaking not necessary to mix in the group and
s_csum_seed here.  It's useful for the inode table blocks (ITB's)
because the checksum for a particular ITB is located *in* the ITB
itself.  So if an ITB gets written to the wrong place, and in
particular, on top of another ITB, we want to be able to know which
cloned copy was written to the wrong place on disk.

But in the case of the inode and block allocation bitmaps, the
checksums are stored in the block group descriptors; so if the bitmap
is written to the wrong place (and on top of another bitmap), the
checksum will fail to verify, independent of whether we've mixed in
the fs-specific csum seed and the group number.

So I'd suggest dropping this, which will shave a few cycles off of the
checksum calculation, and it will also simplify the code since we
won't need this particular function.

I wouldn't mind keeping the group just to be consistent with all of the other checksums that are used in the filesystem, which are largely inside the structure being checked.

The s_uuid is definitely useful to keep as the seed because the block and inode bitmaps are not initialized at mke2fs time with uninit_bg, and it is possible to read a stale bitmap from disk that might belong to an earlier instance of the filesystem in case of a failed or misplaced write of the correct bitmap. 

That isn't important for e2fsck, since it doesn't really use the bitmaps, but it is important for the kernel not to use bad bitmaps and corrupt the filesystem further. 

Cheers, Andreas