Ability to create reproducible ext4 filesystem images

[AdithyaTSIP]

I am working towards reproducible builds for a project that I am involved in which uses debos. We use a few ext4 partitions in our disk images and I am trying to make the ext4 filesystems reproducible.

I understand that e2fsprogs v1.47.1 supports creating reproducible ext4 filesystem images. This works fine when the contents of the filesystem are provided at filesystem creation time. But as per my understanding of debos (looking at [1]) debos creates the partitions first (ex: ext4) and then mounts the partitions based on the mount points specified in the recipes (image-partition action).

The mount operation updates the last mounted and last write time stamps in the ext4 filesystem metadata which leads to reproducibility issues.

I would like to understand if there is a way to make the ext4 filesystem images reproducible even after filesystem operations like mounting and unmounting the filesystem ?

[1] https://github.com/go-debos/debos/blob/main/actions/image_partition_action.go#L620