Comment 2 for bug 1881935

This relatively simple to change the default inode size in all cases. Look at /etc/mke2fs.conf, which is in the sources as misc/mke2fs.conf.in. Find the lines where the inode_size is set to 128, and change it to be 256. (This might or might cause problems on Hurd; since I'm not sure whether the GNU Hurd can support modern file systems with 256 byte inodes. Heck, the GNU Hurd implementation doesn't support journalling or extents last I checked.)

This will double the overhead of ext4 file systems, especially on small file systems. This is why the default is set the way that it is. For really tiny thumb drives (especially the cheap ones found in the checkout aisle of the Micro Center), they are very likely to self-destruct within a few months, never mind 18 years. And users might get cranky if the amount of usable space is decreased.

It may be that for the installer, it will want to hard code the use of a larger inode size, or specify a file system usage type hint via the -T option which could trigger a different default in mke2fs.conf. This is fundamentally a policy question, not a technical issue --- and different distributions may have different opinions about what the defaults should be; this is why we've made it easy to customize the defaults should be in misc/mke2fs.conf.in in the sources, as opposed to hard-coding it in the misc/mke2fs.c source file.