ext3fs in Linus' Kernel Tree

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Posted by michael on Friday November 9, 2001 @06:58PM from the journaling-for-the-unshaven-masses dept.

peloy writes: "According to Linus' changelog for Linux 2.4.15pre2, the long waited ext3fs, the sucessor of ext2 with jounaling capabilities, has finally made its way into the official kernel tree. I have never tried ext3fs but it looks that now that it is "blessed" by Linus I'll be upgrading my old and trusty ext2fs partitions soon."

2 of 384 comments (clear)

I wish Linus would stop this by Billly+Gates · 2001-11-09 20:25 · Score: 2, Troll

I have nothing against the ext3 filesystem or the new virtual memory patch but Linus needs to stop adding these relatively radical changes into the so called stable kernel reserved only for drivers and bug fixes. The issue is not that big for most hackers reading this but alot of us run Linux on mission critical servers that we bet our jobs on. Even before the radical kernel patches, all the newer kernels had big-time showstopper bugs. Many admins even run the old 2.2 kernel to avoid unnecessary problems. I have been running 2.4 and had no problems yet luckily. However I really do not know if I can recommend Linux as a server OS anymore. I want stability and Freebsd and Solaris seems to meet my needs alot more. Hopefully this madness will stop soon. We all love to bash Microsoft for releasing buggy service packs for NT that have not been tested thoroughly but there seems to be no real testing with Linux kernel patches. Freebsd conquered this problem by having 2 development teams. One for the stable branch and one for the development branch. No radical changes are allowed in the stable branch and the stable branch must go under lots of testing to be approved to be released as stable. I now know why BSD hackers love there development model. Cutting edge is great for some users but please do not include it in the kernel where a lot of people count on it for servers and mission critical applications.

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Hardware journaling? by swb · 2001-11-10 02:43 · Score: 2, Troll

Are there any disk array controllers or other storage devices that do FS-independant journaling at the block level?

It'd be an interesting way of doing backups -- instead of restoring from tape, you could get the disk controller to back out changes to a specific timestamp.

I'm sure there are some gotchas -- without knowledge of the filesystem, a specific hardware level transaction may not have complete filesystem level coherency, for one. And it may take a lot of disk to keep a log of any decent duration.

But it still seems like an interesting way to accomplish some kind of fault tolerance for any OS.